NYT Editorial: The Senate on the Brink

[kskiska]

The White House's insistence on choosing only far-right judicial nominees has already damaged the federal courts. Now it threatens to do grave harm to the Senate. If Republicans fulfill their threat to overturn the historic role of the filibuster in order to ram the Bush administration's nominees through, they will be inviting all-out warfare and perhaps an effective shutdown of Congress. The Republicans are claiming that 51 votes should be enough to win confirmation of the White House's judicial nominees. This flies in the face of Senate history. Republicans and Democrats should tone down their rhetoric, then sit down and negotiate.

President Bush likes to complain about the divisive atmosphere in Washington. But he has contributed to it mightily by choosing federal judges from the far right of the ideological spectrum. He started his second term with a particularly aggressive move: resubmitting seven nominees whom the Democrats blocked last year by filibuster.

The Senate has confirmed the vast majority of President Bush's choices. But Democrats have rightly balked at a handful. One of the seven renominated judges is William Myers, a former lobbyist for the mining and ranching industries who demonstrated at his hearing last week that he is an antienvironmental extremist who lacks the evenhandedness necessary to be a federal judge. Another is Janice Rogers Brown, who has disparaged the New Deal as "our socialist revolution."

To block the nominees, the Democrats' weapon of choice has been the filibuster, a time-honored Senate procedure that prevents a bare majority of senators from running roughshod. Republican leaders now claim that judicial nominees are entitled to an up-or-down vote. This is rank hypocrisy. When the tables were turned, Republicans filibustered President Bill Clinton's choice for surgeon general, forcing him to choose another. And Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, who now finds judicial filibusters so offensive, himself joined one against Richard Paez, a Clinton appeals court nominee.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/06/opinion/06sun1.html

[Goldeneye]

1. What is this business about

unanimous consent. What kinds of things do senators give unanimous consent to?

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

5. as I understand it

(which is just an impression, so it may be wrong), there must be unanimous consent to do some of the basic workings of the Senate. If the Repukes are stupid enough to kill the filibuster (and some Republicans are smart enough to realize how bad this idea is), the Dems can just refuse to let ANYTHING happen in the Senate, and no bills or anything will get passed.

[OKNancy]

2. Thanks for posting

An unsigned editorial at that!

Just one more little tidbit:

The Bush administration likes to call itself "conservative," but there is nothing conservative about endangering one of the great institutions of American democracy, the United States Senate, for the sake of an ideological crusade.

[stopbush]

3. The spineless NY Times. They led the witchhunt on Clinton's blowjob.

They trumpeted Whitewater after REPUBLICANS said there was no there there. They gave Judith Miller front page space to act as propagandist-in-chief in the build up to the illegal war in Iraq...and now they complain that the country is reaping what they help so fervently to sow.

Fuck them.

[bemildred]

4. Indeed, fuck them, credibility is like virginity, once you lose it ... nt

[indepat]

6. What would you expect from mendacious, duplicitous, reichous hypocrites?

[Wells]

7. Won't matter cuz we'll all be dead...

There must be only few Far-Right candidates for political positions, judicial or otherwise, since the same extremists keep reappearing for appointment. Or perhaps DUHbya is miffed that any 'lesser' person deign to question his royal decrees.

DUHbya, on how he will be judged by history: "It won't matter cuz we'll all be dead".

So inspiring. (sarcasm)