Free Republic

...if we take back the Senate Before you shake your fist, consider the strategy at work here. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on Thursday that if he were to emerge as majority leader following this fall’s elections, he’d prefer to keep in place the minority party’s ability to filibuster legislation…While he said he thought Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) had done a “lot of damage” by using parliamentary procedure to enable some judicial and executive nominees to move through the chamber with 50 votes, he suggested that he had no plans to try to undo that change. He...

The Democrats’ majority in the Senate is on the line this election season, and if Republicans take back control, the GOP will need to decide on new rules for the new Congress in the upper chamber. Some Republican members are willing to go back to way things were before Harry Reid took the gavel. In the wake of the recent controversial nomination of Judge David Barron, author of the memo which gave a legal basis to kill Americans abroad with drones, to the first U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Republicans became apoplectic after getting word that Senate Majority Leader Harry...

Original Title:The Obama Lie That Was So Bad the Washington Post Said, ‘On Just About Every Level, This Claim is Ridiculous’ President Barack Obama earned “four Pinocchios” from the Washington Post Fact Checker, the highest ranking for a political lie, for asserting that Republicans filibustered 500 pieces of legislation, an exaggeration of nearly five times the reality. Obama spoke at a fundraising event for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Los Angeles Wednesday, and made the charge against Republican lawmakers. “Here’s what’s more disconcerting; their willingness to say no to everything — the fact that since 2007, they have filibustered...

Monday night in the U.S. Senate, something historic happened. Democrats took to the floor and demanded…um…nothing, really. And they weren’t going to leave until…they felt like it, I guess. That was the gist of the PR stunt known as “#Up4Climate” on Twitter. It was a filibuster that wasn’t really a filibuster that sought to draw attention to an issue progressives have deemed so important they have not offered or attempted to pass anything on since they took control of the Senate in 2007. That’s right, Senate Democrats have no legislation to address the coming “doom” they predict from the Artist...

But 15 minutes after the voting should have ended, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had apparently secured only two of the five Republican votes he needed to join all 55 members of the Democratic caucus to pass the measure. He raised three fingers in the air and worked his way among his members but was met with folded arms and shakes of the head. Looking queasy, he patted his thigh nervously and drummed his fingers. In the hubbub, Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) knocked a full glass of water and coaster from McConnell’s desk to the floor. Democrats, watching the spectacle,...

HOUSTON — The Mostyn Law Firm and its attorneys are spending a small fortune to ensure Texas Sen. Wendy Davis' political ambitions come to fruition. The most recent contribution came on Dec. 31, with the Mostyn Law Firm ringing in the New Year by donating $1 million to the Texas Victory Committee -- a joint project of Wendy R. Davis for Governor and Battleground Texas, according to the Texas Ethics Commission. Davis, a Democratic gubernatorial candidate, is no stranger to law firms specializing in civil litigation, as she first joined the Fort Worth law office of Haynes & Boone in...

Democrats may have changed the rules on filibusters, but far from ending the intense battle over President Obama’s nominations, the move has pushed Republicans to fight harder — and to pioneer other tactics. The latest move was made late Friday, just as the Senate was preparing to adjourn for a two-week recess. Republicans refused to allow a courtesy request to keep the full slate of Obama nominees pending. As a result, the nomination process must restart early next year. It was a capstone of a year in which a deal on filibusters frayed and finally collapsed, leaving the Senate atmosphere...

Above: Illegal aliens made out like banditos thanks to Harry Reid and Senate Democrats. Disabled vets? Not so much.- They actually did it. They are on the record. Senate Democrats, led by their filibuster-slaying dictator Harry Reid, actually put the interests of illegal aliens above those of our disabled military veterans.Let that sink in for a moment. Now the details: The two-year budget deal brokered by Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, would cut military pensions by $6 billion over ten years. Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, joined by several others in his party, tried...

Senate Republicans will stage a more than 30-hour talkathon on the Senate floor to protest Democrats’ triggering of the "nuclear option" last month. The GOP protest, which could extend into the weekend, will throw a wrench in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) hopes of wrapping up legislative business for 2013 as soon as possible. Republicans will delay a final vote on Cornelia Pillard, one of President Obama’s picks for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, until about 1 a.m. Thursday. Then, Senate Republicans will hold the floor throughout the night, speaking out against Reid’s use of the nuclear option....

Subtitle: The solution to a dysfunctional Congress is not for Obama to govern the country all by himself. In the face of congressional gridlock, President Obama has started taking more and more matters into his own hands. In recent months, he has announced new gun control measures, put in place limited immigration reform and made fixes to the Affordable Care Act — all without Congress. Many liberals who once worried about presidential overreach have applauded his robust use of presidential power. Yet the president's increasing unilateralism shouldn't be cause for celebration. Bypassing Congress means bypassing democratic checks. It also means...

Hypocrisy about the nuclear option comes easily to today's Democrats.If hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, then calling Harry Reid, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden hypocrites for abandoning their previous “principled” defense of Senate filibusters is an insult to hypocrites. Hypocrites, after all, recognize the power of principles and try to squirm out of the vice of violating them, but today’s post-modern Democrats feel no shame in making contradictory “principled” arguments because they no longer pay any tribute whatsoever to the virtue of neutral, non-partisan principle.These Democrats are practicing the philosophy of post-modernism preached by liberal theorists...

Republicans and Democrats can debate which party has most abused the option, and which has been more hypocritical in changing its mind about the filibuster once it went from the majority to the minority or the reverse. Neither side has acted with selfless regard for the will of the people or the proper functioning of government. The change adopted by the Senate has been dubbed the "nuclear option," as though it were unimaginably destructive. But all it destroys is the capacity of the minority party to frustrate the operation of the legislative branch. And it applies only to executive and...

**SNIP** “Filibustering a sitting member of Congress for the first time in 150 years is an insult to a colleague and, in the case of Representative Mel Watt, is a hit in the gut to the African American community. Once a president is elected, he is entitled to his choice of executives to implement the policies he had promised to carry out if elected. Representative Watt, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a graduate of Yale Law School, had deep professional experience in housing as a practicing attorney before coming to...

What do you think about the use of filibuster in the US Senate? I like the filibuster as it has been used.The filibuster should be used in only certain situations.The filibuster is OK when my side uses it, but not OK when the other side uses it.The filibuster should be abolished.

For all the gnashing of teeth over the lack of comity and civility in Washington, the real problem is not etiquette but the breakdown of political norms, legislative and constitutional. Such as the one just spectacularly blown up in the Senate... The violence to political norms here consisted in how that change was executed. By brute force — a near party-line vote of 52 to 48 . This was a disgraceful violation of more than two centuries of precedent. If a bare majority can change the fundamental rules that govern an institution, then there are no rules. Senate rules today...

".......Reid clearly felt strongly about the [filibuster] when Democrats were the minority party in the Senate, and he insisted that as majority leader he would never target the filibuster. However, as the problems with the Obamacare rollout continue to mount, and the president barrels headlong into lame-duck territory amid plummeting poll numbers, Reid is invoking his “right to change how I feel about things.” As is the president, apparently. Reid’s change of heart dates back to October 2011, when he used the nuclear option to scale back the ability of the Republican minority to offer amendments, something he has effectively...

The Senate vote Thursday to curb the use of filibuster against judicial nominees, over the objections of the Republican minority, can only be seen as a terrifying development. Why, next thing you know we could be deciding all sorts of things by majority vote. The average American may think deciding things by majority vote is the basic idea of our democracy. But say something like that, and you risk getting a lecture on how America is not a democracy but a constitutional republic, and that the framers took care not to give too much power to the people, and that...

Congress is broken, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Thursday before holding a party-line vote that disposed of rules that have guided and protected the chamber since 1789. Democrats were fully justified in stripping Republicans of their right to filibuster President Obama’s nominees — yet they will come to deeply regret what they have done. Reid’s remedy — calling a simple-majority vote to undo more than two centuries of custom — has created a situation in which the minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, is expected to use the minority’s remaining powers to gum up the works, and to get...

There are a few Rules the House can change in retaliation for the questionable Senate rule change. 1. No more reconciliation committees. 2. Blue slip any legislation stripped and packed by the Senate under origination theory. 3. Cut Senate and House budget allowances for travel. 4. Basically start defunding the Senate. Anybody else?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev) move to eliminate the rule that required a 60-vote majority to end debate has “grievously irked” his GOP counterpart, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ken). “Harry promised he would never use this so-called ‘nuclear option,’” McConnell complained. “When you put this together with the false promises of ‘if you like your insurance you can keep it’ that have been made by the president and virtually every Democrat over the past three years we see a pattern of deception that has destroyed the Government’s credibility. I’m fighting mad.” McConnell says he places most of the blame...