It’s quite remarkable, or at least it *should *be, to see the Counselor tell us that holding hearings and taking votes by the entire Senate is *equivalent *to not holding hearings and not taking votes, by the decision of a single individual.
We all do have the power to declare a position to be ridiculous. Like now, for instance.
Maybe it’s worth considering why.
Bricker, I’ve got some good news for you:
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/trump-supreme-court-pick-232102
Among other things, this is a major hurdle discouraging me from taking your position seriously - you’re too obviously motivated to make Bork the example because you personally approve of how you think he would have conducted himself on SCOTUS, i.e. he would have interpreted the Constitution in a way that you like.
Did it? Bork certainly wasn’t the first rejected nominee. I seriously doubt he was the first nominee rejected in a particularly vociferous fashion (ref: G. Harrold Carswell). Possibly he was the first post-Roe nominee who’d explicitly expressed an interest in undoing Roe.
And actually, looking into the record, what the Republicans have done (and very likely would have done to a hypothetical Clinton45) isn’t really unprecedented, either. A Democrat-majority Senate appears to have ignored three nominations by President Fillmore (the last Whig to hold the office). The vacancy Fillmore had been trying to fill was eventually taken by John Archibald Campbell in 1853, nominated by Filmore’s successor, Democrat Franklin Pierce.
Heh… modern Senate Republicans are still dicks, but at least they’re not wholly *original *dicks.
Of course, I can’t really recommend that Democrats do now what the Whigs did then, i.e. disentegrate, leave a vacuum that encouraged the creation of the Republican Party and incidentally set the stage for civil war.
Actually the Senate does not split the term. If they choose to hold a vote then, per Senate rules*, the vote is whether to grant “advice and consent”. It is treated as one concept, and is listed as a single entry in the Senate website’s glossary of terms.
The main problem I have is a continuing concern that the President-Elect understands that “originalist” is a type of jurisprudential analysis and not the antonym for extra-crispy.
Sure, he was. The whole Senate got to vote on him and they rejected him. What was he expecting, a parade?
A fair hearing.
Simply put, the democrats don’t have a strategy to stop the republicans, who have been building a strategy for government control at state and federal levels for 30-40 years. A lot of republican voters unwittingly vote against themselves and democratic voters show up for major elections but then go back to watching Netflix and posting on social media in between and then blame sitting presidents for not being able to wave a magic wand and fix the country.
The republicans are going to eliminate the filibuster and simply put up a yes or no vote on all of the nominations and the democrats are just going to have to grin and bear it. And they’ll have to find a platform that appeals to a broad section of voters and play to win local elections as well as national ones. And in the meantime, more voters are just going to have to understand what they’ve voted for.
The Democrats have to stop repeating this meme that Republicans “vote unwittingly agains their interests”. I think that is the single biggest obstacle they have to recognizing what needs to change in their messaging. How dare you tell people, whom you don’t know, what “their interests” are!
People sometimes don’t know what their interests truly are or what they should be, but I think we all want a clean environment, jobs and income, good education among other things. You can call me out as an elitist if you like, and maybe I am. I do agree that we probably can’t go around phrasing it quite the way I have. Democrats, like it or not, need to understand ‘reality’ as experienced by others before selling them on their own reality.
Meaning what, exactly? Was it rendered unfair by the vocal opposition some prominent Democrat senators expressed? Should they not be free to express their opinions? Regardless, the entire Senate got to vote on it, and thus individually senators could decide how much weight, if any, to give to those opinions.
Comparing 2016 to 1987 is misplaced. Comparing 2016 to 1852-54, when two of Millard Fillmore’s nominees were ignored while the Senate waited him out, is far more appropriate. You can even blame Democrats for that one, if you like.
I’m with Bryan on this. What made his hearing “unfair”?
Wow. Now you’re telling people what their interests should be? I’m not affiliated with either party, but I might as well be a de facto Democrat because I almost never vote Republican anymore. I hope the Democratic party never starts telling folks what their interests should be.
Ideally, I hope this latest election gives the Democrats a new respect for federalism. It was bad enough when Bush was in charge, but now we have The Orange One. The less he has to say about what we do in CA, the better I’m going to feel.
I looked into it further, just for laughs. The longest SCOTUS vacancy was 841 days, from April 1844 to August 1846, when a Whig-controlled Senate refused to act on President John Tyler’s nominations, waiting until James Polk was elected.
I made a minor error earlier when referring to an 1852-54 period in which Milladrd Fillmore’s nominess were ignored. The period was actually July 1852 - March 1853, less than eight months and not even in the top ten longest SCOTUS vacancies.
Heck, I’m sure there are even *more *examples of the Senate ignoring the nominations of an different-party president. Bork isn’t relevant to a discussion of such.
Isn’t there a marketing term for this? Like if, for example, subjects tell a marketer they want a coffee with a hearty roast because that’s what people are supposed to want, but in a taste test they actually prefer some watered down milky stuff.
Selling people something they don’t really want and don’t really need? That’s just “marketing” in general.
Then how does that make you or I any more qualified to speak on what other people want, than those people themselves? What if they say **we are the ones who don’t know what we want? You list generic-sounding things like jobs and clean environment, but a right-winger could easily say, “Deep down, the vast majority of America secretly craves traditional family values, a crackdown on illegal immigration and relaxed laws on gun ownership; the ones who outwardly oppose such things just are in denial of their inner agreement with such things.”
From Politico: Democrats to give Trump Cabinet picks the Garland treatment
There seem to be two schools of thought as to the rationale.
But:
I guess it’s a good thing they can’t filibuster Cabinet nominations anymore (Thanks Harry!).
Forcing extended debate on individual Cabinet nominees (or even ALL of Trump’s Cabinet nominees) isn’t exactly giving them the Garland treatment; the whole point is that Garland didn’t get a hearing or any public debate.