But they still have to make that decision.
The Senate decides their own procedural rules and those rules says the Senate majority leader sets the legislature’s agenda. So whether you like it or not, they made a decision by refusing to hold hearings. It was pretty cowardly and done on a flimsy excuse but it was not outside the rules.
House passes new Dream Act.
I doubt Mitch will let it come up for a vote.
Another good candidate for “if you hold no vote, it passes.” If you don’t like any specific legislation, then vote it down.
You simply can’t do that with your system. The Senate doesn’t vote on the House bill, they create their own parallel bill to pass. Youre demanding that the Senate let the House set their agenda. And if you take a step back you’ll realize that there is a shit tonne of stupid stuff the House passes that AREN’T good candidates for “if you hold no vote, it passes.”
Just so long as you are not under the impression that you are making a reasonable request of those who may have supported the nomination.
Nice hyperbole in your adjective choice. Gives your objection more gravitas, don’t you tink?
Of course, that’s why they have a vote.
I think that the senate should be asked, and in this case, the senate was not.
Of course they can vote against the nominee, that’s the whole point.
Authoritarianism* is* usually established according to the rules.
Is the point of that post that you agree Mitch followed the rules but you really wish he’d held a vote?
I’m not sure that’s how it works. The can create a new bill, or they can modify a bill, but they can also vote on the house bill
Funding bills can only originate in the house, so if you are correct, then how can the senate vote on a funding bill?
In any case, can go both ways and require the house to vote on bills sent to it be the Senate.
And how is that determined? Is that the determination of one person as to what is “stupid stuff”? Why not ask the senators what they think? If holding no vote means it passes, then that wold encourage senators to vote against things that they think are stupid, rather than avoiding taking a position on it.
No, my point is that creative interpretations of the rules, which even if technically justifiable with a motivated reasoning, but is against the spirit of the law and against the interests of democracy is how fascists take power.
We can let this happen, because they didn’t technically break any rules, or we can hold them to account for damaging our institutions and the public’s faith in them. Even if you liked the results, you should be horrified by the process that got them.
Just like a SovCit is technically right that the President that presided over the imposition of income tax was not born in a state that was at the time fully and officially entered into the union, and thinks that that technicality means that they don’t have to pay taxes. Their argument seems silly, until they are in a position to actually enforce it.
I don’t know if it’s technically a different bill but any complex legislation often has to go through a Conference Committee to hash out differences between what the House passed and what the Senate passed.
I think he should have let a vote happen but what he did was not a novel new creative way to interpret the rules. Legislation and nominations have been allowed to expire without a vote for the entire history of the country.
“Resolving it,” in this case, would consist of interpreting the Constitution. IOW, the power the Supreme Court has asserted since Marbury. It’s kinda their day job.
But as always, thanks for playing.
Boy, such confidence. It’s almost like you think you’re an authority. You’re free to believe the court would order the Senate to convene and have a vote. I’ll be sitting over there in reality, let me know how it goes.
On which ground? We’re arguing about the one that CarnalK gave.
Wow, what a rebuttal! I’m floored.
We’ll see if Bone has something in those cases that backs you up, depending on whether he’s got the energy to do more than link to a couple of court cases. I swear, I’m gonna start claiming victory by linking to the front page of Wikipedia.
I’m not sure what you think is not responsive. Two individuals filed suit to attempt to compete McConnell to hold a vote and the court said they don’t have standing. It was district level, so not a final adjudication, but it seems to speak to your idea that the court could resolve the lack of holding a vote issue.
I think RTFirefly’s plan is that the President would file the lawsuit, who I assume would take different legal reasoning to show he has no standing.
This is correct. In many (most?) cases involving actions by branches of the government, it takes more than just being a citizen to have standing. And dismissing a suit over standing means that none of the issues raised by the suit were addressed by the court.
No court has found a “lack of judicially discoverable and manageable standards for resolving” such a case, which is what CarnalK claims is the reason it would be dismissed as a political question.
Well, you’ve claimed that in the wake of the Senate refusing to consider the Garland nomination, the courts would have rejected a Presidential challenge based on the ‘advise and consent’ language because it was a political question per the “lack of judicially discoverable and manageable standards for resolving” standard, one of several standards for a question being a political question per Baker v. Carr.
I’ve disagreed, and I’ve given straightforward reasons that this is your rebuttal to.
Now it may be that a court would dismiss such a case as a political question under some other standard set out in Baker v. Carr. That’s outside the scope of what we’re debating here. Neither one of us is an authority, but I’ve made at least a brief argument, and you’ve made none.
I think your suggestion that the court would order the Senate to vote is rather obviously unconstitutional. As I said earlier, the Senate has a Constitutional right to set its procedures and those procedures include the Senate majority leader setting the agenda. The Supreme Court can’t tell them to do it a different way so there is no remedy the court can apply.
And if you want substantial responses, maybe don’t end your posts with “thanks for playing”.
If McConnell tries this again, we may see this tested in court. Along with other potential attempts at a solution. It doesn’t seem likely to me that McConnell would be able to hold up a nomination for 2-4 years, but we’ll see (or hopefully we won’t!).
Baker v. Carr was about redistricting wrt voter representation. How do you think Senate non-action on judicial nominees applies? Or is it that you’re taking the political question standards from Baker? I mean, it seems clear that compelling the Senate to formally act would run afoul of the 4th criteria laid out in Baker, “impossibility of a court’s undertaking independent resolution without expressing lack of the respect due coordinate branches of government”. There’s probably other facets that would push towards non-judiciability, but that one would be sufficient.
Independent of the political question judiciability, I think standing would also be a tremendous hurdle. I’m not sure that such a suit, even brought by the President, wouldn’t also be dismissed for lack of standing in the same way the other two cases I linked to did. From Michel linked above (my bold):
The claim about vote dilution or seventeenth amendment violation may be different if coming from the President. What actual claim do you think the President could make that would yield a different reasoning? What particularized individual injury would the President allege? Due process maybe? I really don’t see any path a Presidential claim could take.
These are opinion pieces,but were published in the NYT:
There’s also the matter of consistency. The framers understood how to require formal action if they wanted to. Article I, section 7 describing presentment, says that any bill not returned by the President within 10 days shall become law. They don’t do this in any other place, including in the appointments clause. It would not be consistent to interpret a requirement to act by implication given there are explicit requirements to act in other places in the document. Omission of this should be taken as intentional.
And the appointments clause doesn’t have unique application to SCOTUS nominees. It applies to all Article III judges. And in looking at that pool, it’s fairly common for nominees to languish with no action taken by the Senate. For SCOTUS to read some requirement of formal action, they would be doing so for all Article III nominees.
The President is entitled to nominate, and it is up to the Senate to confirm. This separation of powers is pervasive throughout the constitution, and it would be an usurpation of one branch by another if they were to be compelled to act.