I’m glad that we are filibustering a few of his extremely controversial appointments. But in general, I think the president deserves an up or down vote on his nominees.
The interesting thing is how few of the nominees Reid has been willing to bring to the floor for debate. Forget cloture — Reid refuses to allow any debate on the nominees at all.
Reid would rather hold up the nominations than let it come out how bad the nominees are. On the few he brought to the floor, he immediately invoked cloture (because he had the 60 votes) and then so far as I can tell he did not have 30 hours of debate on them — which I don’t understand how he got away with that, he waited the 30 hours before the final vote, but I was sure that 30 hours had to be debate time.
The Senate can make that 30 hours be an instant, by unanimous consent, and has done so on occasion. See numerous unanimous consent agreements calling for a cloture vote, then "if cloture passes, to move immediately to vote on ..." It is typical, however, to treat the 30 hours as a literal 30 hour clock that runs whether the Senate is open for business or not. I've never heard an objection to the protocol of counting the time that the Senate is shut down for the night against the 30 hours of post-cloture time, nor any objection to the clock running while the Senate is open but idle (the routine "quorum call" condition). The relevant language in Rule XXII is:
After no more than thirty hours of consideration of the measure, motion, or other matter on which cloture has been invoked, the Senate shall proceed, without any further debate on any question, to vote on the final disposition thereof ...
These clowns do forget that recess appointments are temprorary. Also, they have the votes, or did have, to over ride any filibuster, why didn't they do it?