Posted on 03/05/2005 7:01:29 PM PST by neverdem
The White House's insistence on choosing only far-right judicial nominees has already damaged the federal courts. Now it threatens to do grave harm to the Senate. If Republicans fulfill their threat to overturn the historic role of the filibuster in order to ram the Bush administration's nominees through, they will be inviting all-out warfare and perhaps an effective shutdown of Congress. The Republicans are claiming that 51 votes should be enough to win confirmation of the White House's judicial nominees. This flies in the face of Senate history. Republicans and Democrats should tone down their rhetoric, then sit down and negotiate.
President Bush likes to complain about the divisive atmosphere in Washington. But he has contributed to it mightily by choosing federal judges from the far right of the ideological spectrum. He started his second term with a particularly aggressive move: resubmitting seven nominees whom the Democrats blocked last year by filibuster.
The Senate has confirmed the vast majority of President Bush's choices. But Democrats have rightly balked at a handful. One of the seven renominated judges is William Myers, a former lobbyist for the mining and ranching industries who demonstrated at his hearing last week that he is an antienvironmental extremist who lacks the evenhandedness necessary to be a federal judge. Another is Janice Rogers Brown, who has disparaged the New Deal as "our socialist revolution."
To block the nominees, the Democrats' weapon of choice has been the filibuster, a time-honored Senate procedure that prevents a bare majority of senators from running roughshod. Republican leaders now claim that judicial nominees are entitled to an up-or-down vote. This is rank hypocrisy. When the tables were turned, Republicans filibustered President Bill Clinton's choice for surgeon general, forcing him to choose another. And Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, who now finds judicial filibusters so offensive, himself joined one against Richard Paez, a Clinton appeals court nominee.
Yet these very same Republicans are threatening to have Vice President Dick Cheney rule from the chair that a simple majority can confirm a judicial nominee rather than the 60 votes necessary to stop a filibuster. This is known as the "nuclear option" because in all likelihood it would blow up the Senate's operations. The Senate does much of its work by unanimous consent, which keeps things moving along and prevents ordinary day-to-day business from drowning in procedural votes. But if Republicans change the filibuster rules, Democrats could respond by ignoring the tradition of unanimous consent and making it difficult if not impossible to get anything done. Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has warned that "the Senate will be in turmoil and the Judiciary Committee will be hell."
Despite his party's Senate majority, however, Mr. Frist may not have the votes to go nuclear. A sizable number of Republicans - including John McCain, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Lincoln Chafee and John Warner - could break away. For them, the value of confirming a few extreme nominees may be outweighed by the lasting damage to the Senate. Besides, majorities are temporary, and they may want to filibuster one day.
There is one way to avert a showdown. The White House should meet with Senate leaders of both parties and come up with a list of nominees who will not be filibustered. This means that Mr. Bush - like Presidents Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush before him - would agree to submit nominees from the broad mainstream of legal thought, with a commitment to judging cases, not promoting a political agenda.
The Bush administration likes to call itself "conservative," but there is nothing conservative about endangering one of the great institutions of American democracy, the United States Senate, for the sake of an ideological crusade.
New York Times Modern (and Amendable) Dictionary defines a "far-right judge" as 1) A jurist who believes it is his/her job to interpret the Constitution in the manner in which it was written. 2) A jurist who ever disagrees with the New York Times. 3) A jurist who believes that people are individuals, not groups. 4) a jurist who believes that the Constitution requires a recognition of the sanctity of the lives of murderers but not of unborn babies.
well, if the NY Times says to not go nuclear I guess Bush better not go nuclear!
I don't think the nuclear option will be used until it is a last resort, i.e. all other legislative initiatives have been stymied in the Senate. Its RINOs are too unreliable.
Couldn't go back that far, however, here are some interesting tidbits:
June 28, 2003 Saturday
Strom Thurmond, Senate Institution Who Fought Integration, Dies at 100
By ADAM CLYMER
Despite the role of civil rights in his political evolution and his record-breaking filibuster of 24 hours and 18 minutes against the civil rights bill of 1957, Mr. Thurmond always insisted he had never been a racist, but was merely opposed to excessive federal authority.
June 5, 2003
From One Esteemed Corner, a Lesson About the Senate's Filibuster Rule
By CARL HULSE
In a letter sent this week, Robert A. Caro, a biographer of Lyndon Baines Johnson and author of "Master of the Senate," which won a Pulitzer Prize this year, warned lawmakers against diluting the rights of the minority even as he noted the filibuster was a potent tool used against the civil rights legislation championed by Senator Johnson...Mr. Caro noted that a filibuster cuts both ways. "If it is being used against you, it is a vicious weapon of obstruction, whose use in a democracy is unconscionable," he wrote. "If it is you who are using that weapon, it is a great one to have in your arsenal."
May 23, 1993
Filibuster Rises to Breathtaking New Heights of Irresponsibility
EDWARD SCHNEIER
BERTRAM GROSS
This system, undeniably undemocratic as you suggest, and perhaps unconstitutional, as was recently suggested by Lloyd Cutler, has been further corrupted by what we might call a caucus filibuster.
May 11, 1993
A Useless Filibuster
Sixty votes. That's what it takes to break a Senate filibuster and speed a measure to a floor vote, where only a majority is required for passage…This time, with some luck, democracy of the small "d" variety will prevail.
July 3, 1994
The Nation;
Filibusters: A Changing Breed
By ADAM CLYMER
...Neither example bears much relationship to the current use of the filibuster. Refusing to agree to set a time for a vote has become a routine Republican tactic designed to defeat or dilute all kinds of bills of less than epoch-making importance... they can prevent the Democrats from assembling the 60 votes the rules now require to force a vote. Sometimes they even refuse to agree to a vote on a motion to start debating a bill. Using one parliamentary device or another, it is possible to filibuster one measure at least four times.
Nor is there much theater to the filibuster any more. Round-the-clock sessions to tire out the angry minority and expose them to ridicule were a manageable tactic when a filibuster came only once every year or two. But they would exhaust the Senate today when filibusters come almost every week. Since the 1960's the Senate has fought filibusters by just having a series of votes to end debate, and doing other less controversial business in the meantime.
That may change this summer. If Republicans refuse to agree to a vote on health care legislation, as some have threatened to do, round-the-clock sessions are likely. Senator George J. Mitchell of Maine, the majority leader, will probably set up cots in the corridors and do everything he canto enable television to treat the Republicans as obstructionists. With the growing national sense that Congress is a waste of time and money even when it is working hard, that is a label many Republicans fear.
June 29, 1984
Pass the Civil Rights Act of 1984
Editorial Desk
...Time will be short after tonight's convention recess to overcome obstructionism in the Judiciary Committee, the threat of a filibuster and the Reagan Administration's harassment. The Civil Rights Act of 1984 needs urgent help. ..Once again it will take all the strength that moderate and bipartisan leaders can muster to overcome them. But they will be overcome.
September 26, 1982
IN THE NATION;A SMALL 'C' VICTORY
By Tom Wicker
The filibuster, so-called, was despised by liberals when Southerners used it to defeat civil rights bills. But eventually the press of events and a slowly-but-surely developing national consensus brought about the needed legislation. But liberals have seldom hesitated to filibuster when they thought it necessary. For as the late Senator Wayne Morse, a master of the art and a former law school dean, used to teach his students: ''He who controls procedure, controls substance.'' Extended debate in the Senate is an established and legitimate procedure for thwarting an impatient or momentary majority. Its purpose is to stand off the kind of ill-conceived and fundamentally damaging legislation Jesse Helms did his best to impose on the nation in the name of religion and conservatism.
[off topic - courts: Another wise feature is the law's correction of a 1980 Supreme Court decision, which made it harder to attack discriminatory pre-1965 election laws -particularly laws enacted for no obvious racial motive but with telling racial effects. Two days after President Reagan signed the new law, the Court endorsed the change by correcting its two-year-old ruling in a case brought by black voters from rural Georgia.]
August 2, 1981
CONGRESS NOW SUFFERS FROM LOSS OF MEMORY
FRANCIS X. CLINES
...Some days, memory seems turned on end, as with the chronic civil rights filibuster in the Senate of late, in which Northern liberals are playing the old Southern role of the willful, defiant band at bay, while Southerners and their allies slowly move toward success in rolling back Federal school busing laws. Last week, the opponents of busing came within one vote of shutting off the filibuster...
December 28, 1980
HEADLINE: A CHANCE FOR FILIBUSTER REFORM
By David Cohen
The last two Congresses have been at the mercy of some champion Senate filibusterers, most of them Republicans. When the 1981 Congress gets under way, the new Senate minority party, the Democrats, may be tempted to brush up on their filibustering techniques.
That would be gravely irresponsible. At stake is the governability of the Senate. The present filibuster rule makes it easy to obstruct Senate business and hard to carry out the majority's program.
The Senate ought to change its rules so that a majority of the body is able to work its will on major issues after thorough debate...And as a responsible leader often frustrated by filibusters, the Democrats' minority leader, Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, should cooperate in that effort...
The key to making the Senate governable is a compromise on the filibuster rule. The Senate should limit the number of cloture petitions that may be filed on a single bill and, as a trade-off, lower successively the number of votes required to end the filibuster.
No more than three cloture petitions should be permitted on any one bill. On the first vote to stop a filibuster, cloture would require a two-thirds vote of those present and voting; if necessary, a second vote would require 60 votes; a third vote, if necessary, should require 51 votes - an absolute majority...
would show that the Senate can act deliberatively and decisively. Then, it could earn our respect.
---David Cohen, before becoming in 1975 president of Common Cause, a nonpartisan public-affairs lobby, was a Capitol Hill lobbyist for liberal legislation
November 8, 1993
Editorial Desk
A Good Start on Overhauling Congress
…their plan will rile turf-conscious colleagues. Among other things, it would limit senators' committee memberships, wipe out many subcommittees, reduce opportunities for filibusters, make Congress obey its own laws, and bring in outsiders for ethics investigations…it is a good start on a responsible reply to public discontent.
August 16, 1993
Editorial Desk
The Phony Retroactivity Scare
Mr. Clinton understood … But his clever two-stage policy was buried by a Republican filibuster.
June 14, 1993,
Editorial Desk
It Sure Quacks Like a Filibuster
It's now apparent that Senate Republicans have two overriding goals with respect to the campaign-financing reform bill now before their chamber -- neither positive... They hope to do so without being seen as obstructionist…The game won't work. If serious political reform dies in the Senate, the Republican fingerprints will be apparent to everyone…
The challenge right now is to break that filibuster and pass the bill …
… he wants the Republicans to allow an up or down vote on the bill itself. That's more than fair. The Republicans should stop quacking and get on with it.
June 6, 1993Editorial Notebook;
New Age Filibusters
By KARL E. MEYER
…it wasn't Madison who put the wrench in the machine. He didn't invent Senate Rule XXII. That's the rule permitting unlimited debate, and as presently construed, the measure makes it all too easy for a Senate minority to paralyze action, as Republicans did with Mr. Clinton's stimulus package…But nowadays the Senate engages in what one critic, Norman Ornstein, calls New Age filibusters, exploited regularly by individual senators to gain gratuitous leverage: "The norms of the Senate are so lax that no one suffers vilification or even criticism. . . ." Result: gridlock. Why blame Madison for that?
Frist has 54 votes
So this is the NYT solution to the problem of conservative filibusters:
No more than three cloture petitions should be permitted on any one bill. On the first vote to stop a filibuster, cloture would require a two-thirds vote of those present and voting; if necessary, a second vote would require 60 votes; a third vote, if necessary, should require 51 votes - an absolute majority...
would show that the Senate can act deliberatively and decisively. Then, it could earn our respect.
Look at the examples in comment# 185. Then look at the Connecticut Compromise. The Senate was created to frustrate simple majority rule. Senate rules were created so that majority rule didn't run roughshod over the minority and the minority's rights. They mandated super majority votes which, in effect, forced bipartisan votes in order to be successful.
Why has compromise almost always worked against the right side of the political spectrum tells you more about the nature of our political opponents and politicians in general. They will do anything to stay in office.
Changing the rules for voting for cloture can be a double edged sword with the potential to hurt the right if they ever become a minority again. If they do it, they better be very careful to limit to just judicial nominees, but even that has the potential to hurt in the future.
How do you figure that?
It will be for RINOs like McCain, etc. McCain was re-elected with 77% in the general election last November. I believe he had no viable primary opponent. In many of the states with RINO senators, the only real alternative is a dem.
 Korrupted Klan's Klub |
My humble effort.
Byrd said in part, "I think we try to have good will. My old mom told me, `Robert, you can't go to heaven if you hate anybody.' We practice that. There are white ni**ers. I've seen a lot of white ni**ers in my time. I'm going to use that word."See this Michelle Malkin article about Robert Byrd from March 7, 2001
Former KKK Klansman,
Senator Robert Byrd……
{{I think it is a VERY safe bet that the democrats would waste no time to do this very same rules revision IF/when the Republicans were in a minority status and attempted to exercise a filibuster (or cloture denial).}}
Agreed. The truth is, one of the major problems in the Senate with a lot of these issues is that the Senate operates by a lot of extra-Constitutional rules. They can be manipulated by the majority or the minority, but the end result is effectively disrupting the whole concept of representational government.
LOL, I think we've created an 'anti Byrd' club here!!!
Very nice Meek!
"In the hood!"
Where are all the KKK-Byrd fans tonight?
Trolls!
Deep-Sleepers!
Stealth-Lobbyists!
Where are you?
If anyone wants to find out why KKK-Byrd is so pro-Islamic - GOOGLE up his family surnames
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BLACK MAGIC
