Harry Reid's filibuster plan and the Supreme Court (Reid to make good his threats)

Washington Examiner ^ | 1/3/13 | Duffield

[pabianice]

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has announced he will begin the new Congress today by violating Senate rules and forcing through a set of procedural changes that will undermine Senate conservatives' ability to influence legislation. But the "Reid Plan" will have its most dramatic impact on presidential nominations, especially for the Supreme Court.

The Senate is a unique legislative body that protects the rights of individual senators both to debate and to amend. These rights are valued so highly that it takes a supermajority -- today, 60 votes -- to deny fellow senators those rights. This higher vote threshold and the prospect of extended debate encourage deliberation, compromise and moderation.

Many Senate liberals want to gut this long-standing protection for minorities. Buried in the Reid Plan is a new rule, the "standing filibuster requirement," that will allow a partisan majority to shut off deliberation and pass legislation by a bare majority. Disguised as a debate-promoting measure, this new plan is actually just a mechanism to eliminate the higher vote threshold that has long been required to proceed to final passage of bills and nominations.

This spells the effective end to minority rights in the Senate. Today's 60-vote bar to end debate will be gone, and the Senate will be transformed into President Obama's rubber stamp.

[mykroar]

He is, but he knows if that did happen the Spinelessicans would agree to put it back in force for “fairness.”

[FroggyTheGremlim]

I wasn’t counting on Christie.

[falcon99]

Who is the dictator

[opentalk]

So I assume this will apply to gun control also...just 50 votes to push through.

[aragorn]

I’m right there with ya Osage, on all counts.

[Vendome]

brought to you by those D****heads in GOPe, RNC and putting Mutt Romney on the top of the ticket.

He was a drag down ticket because many republican voters stayed home and we lost an unbelievable opportunity to increase our majority in the House and get a majority in the senate.

Just insane what those tools did and next up will be two black robes that will be ideologically moored to Obama.

[Candor7]

Yes Reid will pay.

Reid was re - elected by virtue of the Mafia and the Unions they control.

Harry: Money, Mob & Influence In Harry Reid’s Nevada is available at Amazon.com. Reid it. ( pardon the pun.)

When one is controlled by the Mafia, one will pay. Harry will pay. The way so many have paid at the hands of the Mafia before.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

Each body, House and Senate, write their own rules and seat their own members. Just after the Civil War, the Republican congress actually *refused* to seat many Democrats, and they could do that. So the SCOTUS could not stop Reid from doing this.

The only thing the Republicans can do is threaten the Democrats that if Reid does this, when the senate goes Republican in the future, the Republicans will give the Democrats the same disdain, and there will be at least two years when the Democrats cannot extensively road block *anything* the Republicans wish to do.

And that could spell the end of a vast amount of what the Democrats want.

Bottom line: this is brinksmanship. Mutually Assured Destruction at two year intervals, but only if the Democrats want it. If they reject it, the balance of power continues. But if they embrace it, the Republicans will embrace it too, and *everything* the Democrats have built over the last hundred years may be forfeit.

This could mean the end of the New Deal. The end of the Great Society welfare state. Slashing the size of the federal government by 50% or more, and throwing countless Democrat bureaucrats out of work.

Their choice.

[eyeamok]

The House can IMPEACH for any reason they wish, the term high crimes and misdemeanors means WHATEVER CONGRESS deems it to be, furthermore Congress has the Absolute Right to LIMIT WHAT the SUPREME COURT has Jurisdiction over, Read The Constitution.