Should the Dems Filibuster Gorsuch?
Desperate Times
Should the Dems Filibuster Gorsuch?
The filibuster is a dubious thing in general in that it gives a minority the power of a majority. If we had two responsible parties, I’d say do away with it. But we don’t.
Michael Tomasky
03.21.17 1:00 AM ET
The Democrats’ dilemma on what to do about Neil Gorsuch is pretty simple: to filibuster or not to filibuster?
To #teamspine progressives, it’s no dilemma at all. Filibuster all these people. Half of me agrees. But another half of me looks around the corner and sees some downsides. And this tension gets to the heart of what it means to try to be a member of a responsible political party in this polarized age.
The filibuster argument is as follows, but before I lay it out, here are the numbers and the procedural issues at hand. There are 52 Republican senators, and 48 Democrats. The filibuster rule requires that a super-majority of 60 senators vote affirmatively to bring a piece of legislation (or a Supreme Court nomination) to the floor, which means that eight Democrats would have to vote with the Republicans, who will presumably vote en bloc for Gorsuch. Those eight could agree to vote to cut off debate, but then vote against the nomination itself, which requires only a simple majority of 51 to pass.
So, it’s generally thought, it might well be that eight Democratic senators from red states—and there are 10 right now who face reelection in 2018—might vote to end debate but still vote no on the final vote, meaning that they could say they voted against Gorsuch in the end even though they voted to permit his nomination to get to the Senate floor.
The inside thinking is that if the Democrats do filibuster, Mitch McConnell might simply change the rules and decide that a Supreme Court nominee is no longer subject to a filibuster. He could do this more or less unilaterally, because former Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid did the same thing a few years ago with regard to lesser federal court nominees. Reid said at the time that he was reinterpreting Senate Rule 22 to exclude federal judicial nominations. McConnell could do the same with respect to High Court nominees—except that he’d need to bring that to a vote, in which case a simple majority of 51 senators would be needed to change the rule. This would constitute voting to end the filibuster, in essence.
snip//
All that said, back to the case for filibustering: God knows, it’s what the Republicans would do. They already did it, and worse. What they did to Merrick Garland was execrable. Totally indefensible. These hearings shouldn’t even be happening, because Associate Justice Garland should be on the bench. There’s no asterisk in the Constitution about a president’s eighth year. There was no discernible principle in what the GOP did last year. There was only a calculation about power: The executive and legislative branches see-saw back and forth between the two parties, but the judicial branch has been the Republicans’ since the mid-to-late 1980s, and it’s been crucial to establishing and maintaining conservatism in many aspects of American life, and Republicans are desperate to keep it that way.
So, the hell with them. If one team’s fighting with a bazooka, the other shouldn’t fight with a pop gun. And maybe, just maybe, if the Democrats hold the line on nominees like Gorsuch who are obviously, however presentable and pleasant-seeming, quite far right in their views, they’ll force President Trump to nominate someone eventually who might be a little more centrist.
It all makes sense to me, some days. Yet other days I wake up and think: But what if McConnell has those 51 votes and can dump the filibuster, not only on Court nominations but on everything?
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/03/21/should-the-dems-filibuster-gorsuch.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
cannot be allowed to place a crony on the court.
Last edited Wed Mar 22, 2017, 11:13 AM - Edit history (1)
That is the real question.
