Should the U. S. Senate give Bush's judicial nominees a hearing?

[december]

Touche

[Tejota]

*Originally posted by december *
IANAL. SCOTUS by 7 to 2 ruled that the Florida SC had behaved wrongly. (The other two didn’t disagree; they just didn’t want to take jurisdiction.)

What Polycarp said. And also–

The phrase ‘behaved wrongly’ is also incorrect. Unless by behaved you mean the Fla Legislature, when they passed the election laws that required for each county election board to use their own discretion in a hand count.

Remember, The 7 to 2 decision was about the problem with varying standards of handcounting, not the fact that handcounting was going on. The State Legislature is responsible for the varying standards problem, not the Fla SC or any of the other actors in the recount at the time.

[ElvisL1ves]

Breyer and Souter simply said there were “problems” with the equal-protection clause. Well, no shit - there obviously is an equal-protection problem with counting a higher percentage of the votes in conservative, white, Republican counties than in others.

The 5’s hijacking of the clause to rule in the opposite direction showed their intent to reach the result they wanted by whatever means. It was an outrage to centuries of progress in civil rights to do so, and it is sad but unsurprising that people similarly-minded to rationalize the result they wanted would claim that Souter and Breyer agreed with it. They didn’t. They voted the other way. Clear now?

[rjung]

Me, I just laugh at the entire “this ruling shall not be used as precedent in any future cases” clause. The 5 have to be really scared of their wobbly ruling to stick that escape hatch in there…

[december]

*Originally posted by davidw *
**quote:

Essentially, you are asking them to cave in to a Republican strategy of packing the court by delaying on Clinton nominees until such time as a Republican President takes the White House and can fill those vacancies with his nominees. You are teaching them that such underhanded tactics pay.

I think this bears repeating. IMO, the Dems are using an effective political strategy… **

If this accusation were true, there would have been a large number of nominees in the pipeline when Clinton left office. However, there were 52 unconfirmed judicial nominees at the end of Papa Bush’s term, and only 41 at the end of Clinton’s term.

I think you will agree that this statistic shows that the above claim is bogus, even though it has been widely repeated.

Furthermore, in a unique gesture of good will, Bush re-nominated two of Clinton’s unconfirmed nominees. It’s time for the dems to reciprocate with some good will on their part.

[Tejota]

*Originally posted by december *
**If this accusation were true, there would have been a large number of nominees in the pipeline when Clinton left office. However, there were 52 unconfirmed judicial nominees at the end of Papa Bush’s term, and only 41 at the end of Clinton’s term.

I think you will agree that this statistic shows that the above claim is bogus, even though it has been widely repeated.

Furthermore, in a unique gesture of good will, Bush re-nominated two of Clinton’s unconfirmed nominees. It’s time for the dems to reciprocate with some good will on their part. **

This is pure nonsense, what matters is how many openings there were, not how many nominations were left unconfirmed.

Once it became clear to Clinton that they were going to refuse to allow him to seat any judges there was no point in having him flood the list with nominations just so that they could languish.
And there would be a real cost in terms of disruption of the nominees lives. It’s nothing more than cruelty to nominate if there is no hope of confirmation.

The real measure of the Republican strategy of going slow in the hope of being able to pack the court later is this: How many judgeships could Clinton have filled if the senate was cooperating? And did that number go up or down during his time in office?