Jophiel wrote:
When Bush was president, Gbaji once wrote:
The intent of the filibuster for instance was so that the Senate could be forced to consider an issue it was debating at length and to the satisfaction of all parties. It was not and was never intended to be a defacto method of requiring a higher approval ratio for everything in order to break the filibuster. It definately is not intended for external debate issues like approving executive appointments.
There are set ratios that are required for various votes in the Senate. The assumption is that if the vote requires 2/3rds of the senate, then if 2/3rds agree, it should pass. Same with majority votres, 3/4th votes, and so on. Requireing all votes to break a filibuster makes that whole disctinction invalid.
There's also a time and place for it. Using it to block an appointment because you don't agree with the politics of the appointee is absurd. Guess what? Democrats are not going to agree with the politics of a Republican appointee. The same can be said in reverse. If you oppose the appointee because he's molested small children, or embezzeled funds, or commited treason or something, then those are valid objections to bring up, and if it takes a filibuster to ensure that you get to air your disagreements, then that's the correct time and place. To use it purely to stall and delay an appointment just because you don't agree with him flies in the face of the appointment process, and ultimately uses up your political capital on things that it might not be best spent on.
There are set ratios that are required for various votes in the Senate. The assumption is that if the vote requires 2/3rds of the senate, then if 2/3rds agree, it should pass. Same with majority votres, 3/4th votes, and so on. Requireing all votes to break a filibuster makes that whole disctinction invalid.
There's also a time and place for it. Using it to block an appointment because you don't agree with the politics of the appointee is absurd. Guess what? Democrats are not going to agree with the politics of a Republican appointee. The same can be said in reverse. If you oppose the appointee because he's molested small children, or embezzeled funds, or commited treason or something, then those are valid objections to bring up, and if it takes a filibuster to ensure that you get to air your disagreements, then that's the correct time and place. To use it purely to stall and delay an appointment just because you don't agree with him flies in the face of the appointment process, and ultimately uses up your political capital on things that it might not be best spent on.
How times have changed...
Joph. If you're going to quote an ancient thread, could you at least link it so that we can get the context? I'm still looking for that particular thread, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I was talking about non-judicial appointments (like cabinet stuff), which btw I also made the same point about with regard to Obama appointments.
Quote:
Ironically, Gbaji was agreeing with me at the time. Because I was criticizing the Democrats using the filibuster to block Bush's judicial nominees.
Edit: Whoops... that particular thread about about Bolton nominated for the UN Ambassador job. I criticized filibustering judicial nominees in a different thread.
Edit: Whoops... that particular thread about about Bolton nominated for the UN Ambassador job. I criticized filibustering judicial nominees in a different thread.
Yeah. That's a pretty big whoops. Massively huge. I've been very consistent that I think it's wrong for the minority party to block temporary position appointments, since those are just part of an administration and can and should change based on the party who holds the presidency. Judicial appointments are a whole different ball of wax since in may cases (especially courts on the top end of our constitutional path) we make great efforts to balance the number of conservative and liberal leaning judges specifically so that we don't have skewed courts that just rule in favor of whichever party appointed them.
Since these appointments last past the term of the president who appointed them, the use of the filibuster to prevent tilting is critically important.
What's really happening with the DC circuit court is that the court has historically been balanced (as you finally got around to admitting), and the Dems want to break the tradition of appointing judges in pairs, with each party more or less choosing the short list of applicants for each seat. It's not the GOP trying to "hold onto their advantage" as you originally claimed, but a blatant attempt by the Dems to create a political advantage for themselves. And in the process they are breaking a long standing political agreement between the parties.
I'll repeat what I said earlier. It's a terrible act to take. The Dems have more or less just broken a major check within our system of government. I'm sure they're assuming that's ok since they broke it in their favor, but in the long run that really doesn't matter. It's broken. And judicial appointments will become far far more about blatantly putting "your guy" into position to endorse "your agenda".
Sad thing is that there are tons of folks on the left who know this, but either seem to not realize the danger to democracy it represents, or don't care. I was tuned into the progressive station on XM this afternoon, and the moron on the radio basically sat there for about 30 minutes gushing about why being able to avoid a filibuster was great because Obama would finally be able to simply appoint judges to that court that would rule in favor of his agenda and then the Democrats could just "get things done". It was kinda chilling. He honestly seemed to not realize that he was basically saying that this was a great thing because it meant that a party could more easily bypass the democratic process. Don't need to pass laws anymore, just decide to do things at the executive level and if you have judges in the right courts who'll say that what you're doing is constitutional, you get to do it.
It's a path to tyranny made more likely by an incredibly short sighted decision. No agenda today is worth doing that IMO.