Mitch McConnell – Incompetent conservative or working for Obama?
Harry Reid could not have been more clear. If the GOP uses the filibuster to prevent the three vacancies in the DC circuit from being filled, the nuclear option would be in effect. The filibuster would go away. It was Mitch McConnell’s choice.
The choice he made throws the the federal judiciary (currently evenly balanced, with 390 GOP-appointed judges and391 Democratic-appointed ones) to the Democrats. President Obama now has 90 federal court vacancies to fill with simple majority votes. I’ll let Kos take it from here:
In other words, surrendering on three judges would’ve allowed the GOP to continue obstructing the other 87. Provoking the Democrats into eliminating the filibuster, on the other hand, now allows Democrats to ram all 90 through with minimal trouble. And there’s no longer any need to try and find judges that can pick up a handful of Republican votes, so they should prove better ideologically. This will also take the judiciary from a 50-50 partisan split to a 55-45 Democratic-appointed one. And we still have another three years of vacancies ahead of us before we choose our next president.
So why surrender their ability to gum up the works?
Is it a bet that they’ll take over the chamber in the 2014 elections? Not really. A presidential veto would negate the need for minority Democrats to filibuster. So is it a bet that Republicans will take both the Senate next year, and the White House in 2016? Perhaps.
That’s a big bet and one that I will take 100 times out of 100. What evidence can anyone point to that shows Republicans can nominate someone who can win a national election? if there is some evidence out there, I’d love to see it.
Congratulations on the power grab! ……….. Like you needed any more of it.
@fbh “Congratulations on the power grab!”
No. Jason is right. This was just a bad bet on the part of the GOP. True ineptitude.
And the realty is that Mitch would have probably avoided the nuclear option if they had let just ONE of the three judges through. Had the GOP gotten together and said, “Let’s let the cute one through, and block the others,” they could have avoided this.
So it really was a calculated gamble that they would soon hold the Senate and the Presidency. But that seems unlikely to happen this decade, especially with the Obamacare issue supporting the Dems in a big way.
Teabags, and teabag elements of the press, already hold McConnell in contempt. The fact that this was McConnell’s biggest screw up yet will begin to filter into the coverage. That will be fun to watch.
It seems that the time gaps for judicial nominees being confirmed in the Bush administration were actually a little higher than Obama’s.
According to the Congressional Research Service, the gap is 277 days for Bush, and 225.5 days for Obama.
Too bad we don’t have the “Gang of 14” these days.
You know Bush was on vacation half of the workdays during his tenure, right?
Actually the gaps are more like equal to Obama’s according to the CRS, seeing that Obama still has three years left.
I don’t know why I even have a political affiliation. Both parties piss me off. It’s just that the Republicans piss me off less for some reason.
It’s the culture of resentments. You are clearly comfy with that.
This is the story, not about time to approval — because if there was an up or down vote on these nominees we wouldn’t be here: