But requiring a talking filibuster makes it possible that it will fail. It’s not guaranteed. Right now, it’s a guaranteed success.
What evidence have you looked at?
Bricker and I disagree about that as well. And that’s fine too … 
I’d consider that reason to reject, sure.
But that rejection would be based on his judicial philosophy, laid bare by that statement. He demonstrates his inability to apply the guarantees of the Constitution to “all people,” by carving out some people as being not fully human.
Here once again you return to your beliefs like they were they the Noble Truths and you were Siddhārtha Gautama. You want Bork, and all judges, to say in essence, “Hey, this is such a bad outcome, so don’t you worry: I’ll find a constitutional reason to prevent it.”
Bork’s position was simple: if there was a national consensus to end the poll tax, it could not be through Congressional statute or through judicial fiat. A constitutional amendment was necessary, or in the alternative each state should act individually.
And ultimately, lo and behold, yea and verily, the Congress passed by super-majority the language that became the 24th Amendment when ratified by three-fourths of the states, forbidding poll taxes. That’s the way we should legislate change in a democratic republic.
You shiver in your stylish capri-style beachwear at the very thought of anyone, for any reason, doing anything that might be construed as support for the poll tax. But you need to learn to separate the question of policy from the question of method: it is perfectly possible to believe that the constitution permits (pre-Amendment XXIV) a poll tax without being an evil madman.
So, in conclusion, learn to live with it. Your continued effort to cast your invidious rejections as arising from pure and decent hearts while mine arise from wizened and blackened souls simply doesn’t work. You can keep trying, if you like, but you will be speaking to a deaf ear attached to a man whose only bright spot associated with the Trump win is the hope he keeps his promise about judicial appointments. Of course, it’s Trump, so who knows?
That sounds like exactly what I would want in a SCOTUS justice. Fiat justitia ruat cælum - empathy should be irrelevant in interpreting the law. If the law would produce an undesirable result then the law should be changed - by the legislature. The courts should have no role in that.
I can’t say I have entirely kept up with the Court in general and those folks in particular enough to know. But, one thing that comes to mind is that 2 of the Court’s more liberal members (Breyer and Souter) agreed with part of the Bush v Gore ruling that the statewide recount as proposed violated the Equal Protection clause.
Another example, from longer ago, was that on the flag burning case, Stevens, a liberal justice, was actually on the opposite side as Scalia and the more liberal members of the Court, i.e., on the side that one could make laws limiting such an exercise of free speech.
I can’t say how these examples fit into the judge’s larger judicial philosophy, but they are examples of liberal justices voting for outcomes that favor conservative policies or politicians.
I think that people who claim that they can interpret the law without bias or ideology are the most dangerous of all because what it usually reveals a severe lack of self-awareness. I would rather the biases / ideology be more explicit and more in favor of humanity.
I think people with your attitude are the most dangerous, because once you explicitly allow for bias/ideology then there’s no limit to what the law “says” other than what the judge wants it to say. Whereas if you at least try to eliminate it, you have some hope.
They are the same in that in both cases, the nominee doesn’t get to sit on the Court. They are different in the way that the Senate withholds its consent to the nominee.
If he was so obviously scary, why was he unanimously approved as a federal appeals court judge? Wasn’t he just as monstrous then?
Regards,
Shodan
And I’m casually prepared to take that chance and give it the level of concern I feel it deserves. It changes nothing, though. Bork got a hearing (and was found unacceptable) and Garland was refused a hearing (despite all indications that under different circumstances, he’d have been perfectly acceptable). Further, the justification to refuse giving him a hearing - that it was an election year - was itself a flimsy rationalization. Not only were Senate Republicans being discourteous to Garland, they were lying to the American people.
If you want to personally conclude that my understanding of “courtesy” lacks authority, be my guest.
I assume *you *would, once you declare yourself King of America and start ruling by fiat, letting you overrule the Senate on who is or is not an acceptable SCOTUS nominee.
But more seriously, I don’t see a problem with a theoretical constitutional amendment clarifying the nomination process in which a presidential nomination for SCOTUS has a fixed time period, i.e. ninety days, in which if the Senate does not formally reject the nominee, the appointment automatically passes. The exact mechanics can be worked out, of course, the gist being that appointments cannot be indefinitely delayed as Senate Republicans have done to Obama and said they would do to Clinton.
Or just do nothing about it - the American voters didn’t seem to think this was important enough to vote the Republican Class 3 Senators out, and if the Class 1 Senate Republicans get returned in 2018, then a fair conclusion is that the American Federal government is broken and the American public either likes it that way or doesn’t care enough to fix it.
You’d have to eliminate the filibuster, for obvious reasons.
Regards,
Shodan
I suspect this is the case. Things that seem to Dopers like a really big deal (like the Republicans not holding a hearing on Garland or the Democrats nuking the filibuster), are, for most voters, a bit of inside baseball.
I kind of baffled that’s even a thing, truth be told, or at least the painless version of it that now exists where a member isn’t obliged to keep talking for hours on end but can just call “filibuster!” and go back to reading the sports page or whatever.
Yes. He was toxic.
Democrats have confirmed countless Republican nominees including all the ones on the court right now. Bork was especially controversial.
He fired the special prosecutor (Cox that was heading up the Watergate investigation under orders from Nixon. He knew (or should have known) that this was not legal, the two guys that resigned rather than fire Cox knew it was illegal and so did Bork. But Bork did it anyway (perhaps because Nixon promised him the next seat on the Supreme Court).
Bork criticized civil rights legislation that required restaurants and motels to serve non-whites, calling it ugly and unprincipled. Perhaps there were better bases for upholding those laws (e.g. 14th amendment) but Bork wasn’t just criticizing the analytical path that was taken to reach the conclusion. He was criticizing the conclusion itself. He called it a violation of the business owner’s freedom of association. He was cool with business owners closing their doors to people on the basis of race or anything else.
Most importantly, he was vocal about his desire to overturn Roe v Wade. A mistake that no one has made since.
Sure, though that’s not an aspect specific to this board. Here, politics gets discussed a lot while a message board dedicated to, say, Star Wars (or, for that matter, baseball) will also engage in minute analyses of topics that the general public views with limited interest.
The cloture rule (Senate Rule 22) originated in 1917 with a requirement of two thirds vote to invoke cloture and end debate. There were 96 Senate seats at the time with 54 Democrats, 41 Republicans and 1 vacancy at the start of the Senate term. There were several changes throughout the 2 years of the 65th Congress, but the Democrats held the majority the entire two year period. Republicans won control of the Senate in the 1918 elections.
In 1975 the Senate amended the cloture rule to the current 60 vote requirement. There were 100 Senators by then with 60 Democrats, 1 Independent (who caucused with the Democrats), 37 Republicans, 1 Conservative (who caucused with the Republicans), and 1 vacancy. Democrats held a 60 vote supermajority throughout the 94th Congress. The requirement for a talking filibuster was changed at the same time.
TLDR; Yes. The Democrats held the majority both when the cloture rule was first implemented and when it was amended to the 60 vote requirement.
Bork was given a hearing, and rejected as a result (including some Republicans, by the way). His replacement, Kennedy, was approved unanimously. In other words, Bork was rejected because of who he was, not who nominated him.
Garland was rejected before his name was even announced. Subsequently, many Republicans announced plans to block all Democratic nominees in the future as well. In other words, Garland was rejected not because of who he was, but because of who nominated him.
The comparison between the two is not just disingenuous, but so disingenuous that it’s difficult to take remotely seriously.
I don’t find it at all hypocritical to say that Democrats should do anything to block all Republican nominees, despite finding what happened to Garland grotesque. If Republicans block all Democratic nominees, and Democrats don’t follow suit, the obvious eventual outcome is a completely Republican Supreme Court.
If Democrats matching obstruction is met by removing the filibuster, then fine. Let the Republicans be the ones to do it so they won’t be able to complain in the future when their petards are hoisted.
OK. I find this outcome acceptable too.
See, this is why we can’t have nice things.
Most of them are not trying to eliminate it…They are denying they have it, which in fact gives them an excuse not even to try to eliminate it because they don’t have to.