It’s some kind of strange briar patch scenario where both sides seems happy the filibuster is gone. I am guessing there will be buyer’s remorse at some point in the future.
I asked this question before (of another poster) and never got an answer. Looking at Trump’s list of 21 names that he promised to nominate from, how many do you think Schumer and the Democrats would have allowed an up-or-down vote? Most Republicans seem to think that the Dems would’ve filibustered any / all of them. Do you think differently?
2007 really. Once the Dems had House and Senate majorities after the 2006 midterms, the Senate filibustered practically everything, because for some reason it was important to them to make sure that GWB didn’t have to veto the legislation himself. So they made sure nothing got through.
By late summer of 2007, I said somewhere that the one question I’d like to ask the three main candidates for the Dem nomination (Clinton, Obama, Edwards) was: suppose 41 Senators filibuster your entire legislative agenda - what do you do about it? Turned out to be a relevant question. But even then, I didn’t figure they’d filibuster judicial nominations wholesale.
What?
Why can’t I say that you favor letting criminals go free, using that exact same reasoning? You just favor it more than police abuse, right?
I agree.
My objection to “you’re letting criminals go free” rhetoric is that it isn’t actually the case that every person protected by the exclusionary rule is a criminal. And, indeed, assuming they are is precisely the root of the problem. By contrast, every cop who violates the Fourth Amendment is committing the evil we’re trying to end.
Well, how many nominations were being filibustered when the Dems killed the filibuster for the lower courts? One? Two? Many?
No, I honestly don’t know whether the Dems would have felt they’d have to keep filibustering nominees indefinitely to prove their point, or whether one would have been enough.
My expectation, since you asked, is that they’d have thrown in the towel by either the next nominee after Gorsuch, or the next nominee after that. In which case we’d get someone like Gorsuch on the Court, but the filibuster would remain - the worst of both worlds, AFAIAC. But we aren’t going down that timeline, so we’ll never know.
And that’s a relief, because perhaps the filibuster would have been saved to be used against the next Dem nominee to the Supreme Court. I’m quite relieved that it’s been done away with.
But to back track, Bricker and Parker were disputing the veracity of:
[Quote=Senator Edward M. Kennedy]
Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids,
[/quote]
Which doesn’t claim Bork favours it, merely that’s what it would be like.
Under the law, every such person is a criminal. If they weren’t, then there would be no point to the exclusionary rule.
The whole point of that rule is that even if the evidence is enough to prove their guilt, that we exclude it because of how it was obtained. If we only excluded it when it wasn’t enough to prove guilt anyway then there would be no point in excluding it.
That was initially true. However, Richard Parker subsequently said he thinks it accurate to characterize that as Bork favoring it. I commented at that point.
We’re sorry, we forgot. That’s your call, isn’t it? 
I think that the Dems would have probably filibustered any of the judges on the list, yes.
I also believe that in an alternate universe where:
- Mitt Romney wins in 2012 but Democrats hold the Senate in 2014, and Scalia dies as he did in our world, that Harry Reid would have come up with some BS reason to not confirm anyone until after the election, just as McConnell did;
- Democrats narrowly hold their Senate majority in 2014, and Scalia dies as he did in our world, that Republicans would have filibustered any candidate Obama proposed, and that Harry Reid would have invoked the nuclear option to seat the nominee anyway;
- Clinton prevailed in 2016, that McConnell would have never held a hearing for any nominee for the Supreme Court she ever put forward her entire term, invoking ongoing investigations into Benghazi or whatever.
Lots of people get evidence excluded and then are convicted anyway. Lots of people get evidence excluded and were innocent all along. We don’t know if a person is guilty or not before a jury says so. And we exclude evidence that is obtained wrongfully before such a verdict is made. So if you want to get technical, everyone who is protected by the exclusionary rule is innocent (though I suppose some people get their convictions vacated on appeal).
But this is a tangent. If you want to challenge the exclusionary rule by saying that some criminals will go free as a consequence, that is absolutely correct. There’s nothing misleading about that argument. People who are not willing to accept that price to defend our freedom should dislike the exclusionary rule, just like Bork.
Yeah, ok, that’s fine. I can certainly play this game.
It wouldn’t be like that, so Kennedy’s statement was false. Bork would have been confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, not as king. Plenty of other influences would have stopped it, so it’s still a factually false claim.
If you wanna play bullshit parsing, let’s go.
I’m not super convinced either way about the loss of the filibuster’s being a good or bad thing. For folks that think it’s necessary, how about a constitutional amendment that reimposes the filibuster six years after the amendment is ratified? Setting its effect significantly in the future would make it hard to game its ratification for partisan purposes, and could possibly receive bipartisan support.
Short of that, I don’t see its return; on the contrary, it seems likely that the last vestiges will disappear as soon as it becomes convenient to do away with it.
That is my arguemnt. I wa pointing out the coutner arguemnt.
To rehash, my argument is that democrats do occasioanlly do extreme things in extreme times.
The democrats, along with a few republicans, did in fact vote against bork for political or personal reasons that did not have to do speicifcally with his qualifications.
This is apprantly enough to open up the republicans to blocking any nominee that a democrat nominates.
In bush years, there were a couple of judges that some of the democrats did not like, out of the hundres that were nominated and confirmed. Those were held up through filibuster until their names were withdrawn, and their replacements were confirmed.
This is enough to open up repbulicans to filibustering nearly every one of Obama’s appointments.
The democrats can point to an action, and say “This is why I did it.” and create an argument (that you may not find persuasive, but still a logical arguemtn) that there was a specific reason or condition that casued them to invoke extreme measures, but rarely.
The repbublicans can not make that arguemtn, but can only make the arguemnt that the dems did it first. And it’s not a good arguemtn, beucase the republicans also escelate drastically in their retaliation.
I was annoyed that the republicans were blocking nearly all of Obama’s nominees, with no good reason other than they were obama’s nominees, and while I was not a huge fan of how the process went down, it was kind of forced by the actions of the republicans.
In fact, at the time, I thought the understanding was that the nuclear option could only be invoked at the start of a new session, not at any time throughout the term, so I was always disappointed when there was an agreement that there would be no filibusters of nominees, as long as the filibuster stayed in place, but that agreement was reneged upon as soon as a nominee came up that a republican didn’t like.
I was really for, at the time, just completely removing the filibuster, or at least making it harder to sustain, for not just nominees, but for legislation as well.
In any case, I have always been against the procedural filibuster, and do think that if we are to have a filibuster going forward, that it should require some effort greater than just filing a motion to filibuster.
Oh come on, it’s not bullshit parsing. Kennedy was clearly saying that if we follow Bork’s view of the law this is what we’d have. Everybody listening was perfectly aware they weren’t at an Emperor confirmation hearing.
Kennedy was also clearly saying that Bork preferred this outcome. But you quibbled with that.
Why do you get to play the “he was clearly saying” card when it helps you and the “these are the exact words” card otherwise?
I don’t think that’s clear at all. I’m sure Bork would be happy to live in a world without the exclusionary rule and where cops all voluntarily follow the Fourth Amendment. But he would have fought the exclusionary rule regardless of the result.
Are we at the table pounding stage of the Bork debate?
What was the chance that the U.S. Senate would create such a rule in the first place? Next to impossible? Impossible? Improbable? Highly unlikely?
Will those groundbreaking robots also be time travelers?
The filibuster was an accident of a rule change, not a deliberate creation.