An attorney who can recuse himself if he finds the client or his position odious. The job isn’t just an academic exercise. Most of us find torture odious, for instance, but Kavanaugh obviously does not.
If a nominee’s record is not relevant in considering his worthiness for a lifetime appointment, what is?
If full disclosure was important to Obama’s nominees, why should it be avoided with Trump’s? What are they scared of revealing?
We’re not just talking about members of the other caucus though. We’re talking about a group of 51 senators, some of which must come from the Republican caucus for it to get to 51. 51 senators can overrule the parliamentarian, as Harry Reid vividly demonstrated in 2013.
“…the decision I made…” Note the first person singular. He made the decision, or at least, that’s what he said. You know, that it was him. Anyway, you were dispensing? Didn’t mean to interrupt.
ETA: responded before reading most of the thread. Oops. Deleted.
It’s a mistake to say the Senate didn’t want to vote on Garland. The majority of Senators, that is. We don’t know if they didn’t want the vote, and absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Still:
Why did the Senate not vote on Garland?
Why could McConnell block the vote?
How is that constitutional?
QFT.
Your examples may have been enough downside for certain senators (Collins, Murkowski, etc.) to vote “yes” on Garland, had it actually been up for a vote. We’ll never really know.
All we can really say is that strategically, the downsides of having to actually be accountable for an up/down vote outweighed everything else.
I agree. I think the odds were low, but they were definitely non-zero. If I had to quantify, I’d put it in the 10 - 20% range.
Also agreed. I didn’t like the maneuver that McConnell pulled. Not at all. I even thought it was a bad tactic from a purely political standpoint, but I was proven wrong about that. In the end, though, I’m not going to claim that it was unconstitutional just because I didn’t like it.
If by some miracle the Democrats take the Senate, I fully expect them to block any further SCOTUS appointments by Trump. I won’t want them to do that, but it will be difficult to blame them. It’s now the new normal, and it’s completely constitutional until the Senate changes the rules.
I think it’ll take something more than a Senate rule change. Those can be undone by the next Senate. I think it would require a Constitutional amendment.
So, you are all done with your “dispensing”, then? A wise choice.
If an attorney were advising their client on how to break the law, would that become relevant in such a hearing?
No, you can have a reply if you want one:
A politician seizing credit for something or aggrandizing their role in events? I can scarcely imagine …
He deserves some credit for providing some direction, and cover, to his caucus members, but he couldn’t, and didn’t, do it alone. Without the backing of the majority, his words, his decisions, don’t have effect. He probably cajoled some of the more reluctant members into acquiescing to his “decision”, but they did acquiesce. Had they not, had they decided to buck the party leader and defy his wishes, they could have done so.
The notional Democratic majority in the Senate can block Trump’s nominees with a rules change as long as they remain the majority.
And why shouldn’t they? This would simply complete the process they started with Bork. But it’s all good. If the voters dislike it, they can undo the decision by electing a GOP majority in 2020.
But why would they need a rules change to do that? Just vote them down, or if all this talk of the sacredness of holding an up-or-down vote was more politically convenient than core conviction, they could just choose to not hold a vote. No rule change necessary, right?
I skipped ahead, and I have only watched the hearings off and on as I have had time, but I think Kavanaugh is doing wonderfully.
So we’re finally done with you telling us “the Senate” did it? :dubious:
I think you know Bork was *voted *down by the full Senate, and that you know why, and that it had to be done. Or maybe you don’t, but other readers do.
The party-first instinct is so strong that those who hold it cannot conceive that country-first can even be a thing, yes, we get that.
Not particularly, except that we’re getting off into repetitive territory and it’s getting boring. When I wrote “he couldn’t, and didn’t, do it alone” that was intended to mean that he did it with the (at least tacit) support of a majority of the Senate. In other words, “the Senate” did it.
And don’t forget, there were democrats that voted for Bork, and republicans that voted against.
So, the tactic of “you did it first” falls on its face, yet again. Not only did Bork actually get a vote, it was a bipartisan vote down.
I suppose that in that day, you didn’t have a single person speak for the entire party.
Either “the Senate” did it, in which case, they would have a vote and we would see how each senator voted, or one person did it with at the very best “tacit” support of people who didn’t want to overturn precedent and tradition in order to buck their leadership.
The “it” in “the Senate did it” in this case refers to NOT holding a vote, so no, they wouldn’t have a vote. But I think the point you’ve made (that, with apologies if I misstate it here in my attempted summary, it’s harder to cast a vote that bucks the party leadership in an unusual parliamentary maneuver than it might be if Garland had been brought up for a regular up-or-down vote) is accurate, I just think it unlikely that that difference would have been enough to get him confirmed. Like John Mace and YamatoTwinkie stated earlier, there’s no way to no for certain.