Please re-read my paragraph. If they vote “no” without considering the merits of the nominee, they are not acting in good faith and the system is not functioning as intended.
There is not much difference in this case, except that it might be deniable. The fact that the explicitly stated they would not consider any Obama nominee makes it undeniable that the Republicans are acting in bad faith.
And that’s my point. My point is that Silver Lining cannot even claim the Republicans were acting correctly. They publically admitted they had no intention of following the Constitution or negotiating at all.
Well, when you put it like that, I guess I give them even less credit than you seem to be doing: I figure they were — albeit trivially — just being dishonest.
Which is to say: the senators who okayed Gorsuch, once Trump nominated Gorsuch? Exactly as if they believed Gorsuch’s merits were just that impressive? Oh, granted, they said they wouldn’t have okayed Gorsuch if Obama had nominated him; but I believe they would’ve had no trouble shrugging and okaying him. Do you?
But how does following the letter of the Constitution become an issue? I see where the Constitution says the president can do X with the consent of enough senators; I don’t see anything, in the letter of the Constitution, saying that senators have to so consent: not to the first person the president nominates, and not to the second, and not to the third; and not ever. Spirit? Maybe. Letter? Where?
What, specifically, was “unprecedented” about it? Certainly not that the nominee was just never given a vote.
False. The Constitution gives the president the power to nominate. No one told the president he couldn’t nominate. In fact, he did exercise his Constitutional power and made a nomination. Then the Senate chose how to utilize the power the Constitution gives to them to offer advice & consent to the president’s nomination (in this case by not voting).
Your and others’ hyperbole is part of the reason the left is ignored and or ridiculed.
While breaking up families is not the best solution to illegal immigration calling the places the children are staying a concentration camp is an insult to the memory of those who died in real concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Dachau.
Is this the result of the children’s temporary separation?
Auschwitz was an *extermination *camp. There were concentration camps before that.
Here’s a list of camps run by the Nazis. You may see that they were served different functions:
But fine. ICE is kidnapping and trafficking children while hiding them from their parents. Some of these children have been taken thousands of miles from their parents. Not Dachau, still crime.
As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Zilbatt mentioned in discussing their recent book “Why Democracies Die,” a constitution in and of itself cannot protect democracy; it’s just a piece of paper. There are certain unwritten rules that have to be upheld in order for a democratic republican system to function properly. Using procedural power for no other reason than to undermine the strength of the political opposition increases polarization and damages public faith in the entire system of governance.
As has been repeatedly explained to you, which you constantly ignore, a concentration camp is where you place extra-judicial persons to concentrate them in a single facility. A death camp is where you kill them.
Dachau, which you had the gall to cite, was a concentration camp from 1933-1941, whereupon it was repurposed as a death camp.
But, again, I took the GOP position to be — in effect — that the reason why those senators okayed Gorsuch, and the reason why they’ll presumably okay the nominee that Trump will soon name, is because they’re asking, so, will this nominee largely decide cases the way Alito and Thomas do? No? More like Ginsburg and Breyer? See, we think Alito and Thomas are for the most part ruling correctly, and we think Ginsburg and Breyer too often look at the same precedents but then somehow get case after case wrong. We’ll therefore consent only if we have reason to believe this latest nominee sees things much the way Alito and Thomas do.
Which is, I take it, also pretty much the way they view legislation proposed by this or that Democrat: if a bill strikes them as something that should become a law, they of course vote accordingly; and if they think it’s not, they — vote accordingly.
Why wouldn’t they? Isn’t that what they were elected to do?
Replying late and I confess I haven’t read the whole thread but since some of my old material was quoted in taking the liberty.
My reply to that survey would be that I think liberals are using a more honest definition of love.
I d like to see what happened if the knee-jerk Trumpists showed the same kind of “love” for their children as the did for the country.
HD, if you want to love your kid like you love America, here are some ground rules.
Never admit your kid is wrong about anything, ever. Our did anything wrong, ever. Because the prime directive is “If your kid did it, it can’t be wrong”.
If your kid behaves badly towards another, they deserved it. As a parent, you should help them pile on. You must hit back 10 times as hard.
If your kid gets in trouble with his school and teachers, it’s because those individuals and institutions are out to get him. So not only must you excuse your kid, you must come down on those institutions- hard.
If your kid gets in trouble with law, see above.
If you catch your kid doing something horrible and his response is to tell you his sister did a bad thing once, you must let you kid continue doing what he’s doing while you investigate his sister’s misdeeds.
And if you criticize, chastise or, god forbid, even punish your child that means you don’t love him.
And good luck with that. It’s a recipe for turning your kid into a horrid monster.
Roy Moore probably thinks he did the young ladies a favor. There’s this thing that is common within groups that are into the “marrying young girls” thing, like the polygamous cults and some evangelicals
These men want the young girls because they are young and pure and unsullied. But sometimes when they bed these young girls, they find that they are shy and scared and unfamiliar with men’s bodies. I’m sure Moore thought he was doing these future husbands a favor by giving them experience while respecting their virginity. Because that’s the kind of guy he is.
My spidey-sense tells me that this struck a nerve. Personally, I wouldn’t take this as referring to you personally, I’d say it’s aimed at generic right-wingers.
I think the last point is particularly good- what would you think of a parent who, when their son does something wrong, decides to look particularly hard at what the daughter might have been doing? That’ pretty much what Republicans have been doing with respect to their orange leader.
I see how it could be interpreted in the way you are, but that was not my initial reading. Please dial back the rhetoric. Otherwise take it to the Pit.
The fact that they told him all candidates were categorically declined, and that no candidate would be approved until the next Presidency.
Not false at all. Again, the Republicans literally stated that NO Obama candidate would be approved under any circumstances, and only the next President had the right to approve the candidate.
A group of 33 constitutional law scholars explained:
”It is technically in the power of the Senate to engage in aggressive denial on presidential nominations. But we believe that the Framers’ construction of the process of nominations and confirmation to federal courts, including the Senate’s power of “advice and consent,” does not anticipate or countenance an obdurate refusal by the body to acknowledge or consider a president’s nominee, especially to the highest court in the land. The refusal to hold hearings and deliberate on a nominee at this level is truly unprecedented and, in our view, dangerous…
The Constitution gives the Senate every right to deny confirmation to a presidential nomination. But denial should come after the Senate deliberates over the nomination, which in contemporary times includes hearings in the Judiciary Committee, and full debate and votes on the Senate floor. Anything less than that, in our view, is a serious and, indeed, unprecedented breach of the Senate’s best practices and noblest traditions for much of our nation’s history.”
The problem is not that they voted against a nominee. The problem is that they categorically refused to even consider a vote for ANY nominee.
And, as always, if a liberal legislature simply told Trump ANY nominations would be categorically disregarded WITHOUT EVEN BOTHERING TO VOTE, the Republicans would scream at the top of their lungs.
If a Democratic President did any of the horse shit that trump IS doing, they’d scream at the top of their lungs. They would have been impeached him a long, long time ago. Hypocrites every dam one of them.