Tag: filibuster

Keep the 51 vote rule for Presidential appointments.

I’m with Allahpundit on the basic concept – essentially, the Democrats are going to flip it back to 51 whenever it’s advantageous to them anyway – but there’s another reason for not switching: it will reduce the number of symbolic appointments made by the current President.  This is not a theoretical issue, either: Barack Obama got embarrassed on several different occasions this year when he put up candidates that would never have gotten 60 votes anyway… and turned out to be incapable of getting 51, either.  I see no real downside in making the President squirm under the slightly unfocused, but definitely hostile glare of his own base.

Barack Obama: Nuke the filibuster! Me. …Don’t. Stop. Please.

This via a comment by dljessup here: as usual, Barack Obama is showing us the same keen political instincts and appreciation of long-term trends that gave us the 2010 election cycle.

President Barack Obama endorsed more changes to the filibuster rules in the Senate in a speech Wednesday, remarks that will encourage senators who want to deploy the “nuclear option” again.

At a fundraiser for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in New York, Obama specifically said Democrats need to change “how a filibuster works,” without going into specifics on what, exactly, he has in mind.

Continue reading Barack Obama: Nuke the filibuster! Me. …Don’t. Stop. Please.

Harry Reid offers the NRA a scalp on controversial Surgeon General nomination.

Tell me again about how smart it was for Harry Reid to kill the filibuster over nominations. Because I’m pretty sure that it’s going to end up giving the NRA a public win:

A number of Senate Democrats have indicated that they might oppose President Barack Obama’s choice of Vivek Murthy for the post of U.S. Surgeon General, according to Senate aides, putting the nomination at risk over the issue of gun control.

Dr. Murthy’s nomination is opposed by the National Rifle Association, the country’s largest gun lobby, because he has expressed support for gun control, calling it a public-health issue.

Continue reading Harry Reid offers the NRA a scalp on controversial Surgeon General nomination.

Quote of the Day, I Guess Slate Thinks That I’m An Extremist, Then edition.

Because while I guess that this is supposed to alarm people about the implications of the filibuster…

…picture a federal appellate bench composed of numerous Antonin Scalias and Clarence Thomases…

…’alarm’ would not be the verb that I would have used.  Try ‘reassure.’ Or even ‘fill with anticipatory glee.’

Via Instapundit.

Moe Lane

PS: Slate, despite its delusions, is not particularly centrist.  If it were it’d be more pro-gun, more pro-life, and arguably more pro-Israel.

Tweet of the Day, …And The Sign Was Taken Out Back And Never Seen Again edition.

Probably got sent out to a nice farm in the country, where it could play with all the other hideously misspelled and ungrammatical Democratic props:

Continue reading Tweet of the Day, …And The Sign Was Taken Out Back And Never Seen Again edition.

So Harry Reid prepares the Denethor option in the Senate.

Here we go.

Denethor

By the way: when the GOP-controlled Senate in 2015 – and the whispers about that have already started in the Beltway – uses this to force the Democrats to eat ash for two years, please be advised that they. Were. Warned.

Moe Lane

PS: I had a total of two hours sleep last night; I’m not really geared up for anything except brutal honesty right now. And brutal honesty is making me say: the GOP will control the Senate, largely despite itself. Things are just going to get that bad.

Harry Reid will be 77 in 2016.

There was some speculation back in 2010 that this would be his last term. It may simply be that Reid has no plans to be in a Senate where both it and the Presidency are in the hands of the opposition party. Which means that Harry Reid has no real reason not to screw over his colleagues:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s threat to change filibuster rules is supposed to narrowly focus on presidential nominees to the executive branch.

But his potential move to invoke the “nuclear option” is raising a bigger and more sweeping question that could have huge consequences for future presidents of both parties: Is this the beginning of the end of the filibuster? If the filibuster goes, the Senate would lose a crucial check on majority rights — and it could start looking very much like the House, where the majority always gets its way.

And it will screw over his colleagues. Because I have a list, and so does every conservative activist, organizer, gadfly, and partisan hack that I know. It’s a list of stuff that we want, but can’t realistically expect to get to sixty on.

Ted Cruz reaches out to grieving daughter of Sandy Hook victim.

(Via Hot Air) A couple points about this…

The daughter of the Sandy Hook Elementary School principal who died in the mass killing in December could not join others from her community this week to lobby for gun control.

So she turned to Twitter to reach out to the 15 senators who indicated they would engage in a filibuster to block legislation on gun control. She said she just wanted them to vote, not put roadblocks in the way of debate and voting.

Only one of the senators called Erica Lafferty after her tweet – Ted Cruz.

…in no particular order: Continue reading Ted Cruz reaches out to grieving daughter of Sandy Hook victim.

QotD, I Wish To Associate Myself With The Remarks… edition.

…of the distinguished gentleman from Georgia:

I support killing bad guys with drones overseas. Hell, I’m okay with killing bad guys in the United States with drones if they are about to cause imminent harm. But the administration’s standard was far too nebulous. It is opposed by a majority of Americans. Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Marco Rubio, and others who are okay with drone attacks on bad guys supported Rand Paul because Paul found the sliver of ground on which they could all be opposed to an Obama Administration policy.

– My colleague Erick Erickson, over at RedState.  As most of you know, I self-identify as ‘neoconservative:’ and my major problem with Barack Obama’s foreign policy is that he’s trying to do what he thinks George W Bush would do under the same circumstances, only he’s not very competent even at that.  But I loved watching that filibuster.  It was utterly guilt-free; I’m aware of Rand Paul’s likely defense stances, but he managed to keep the debate framed in terms that I could accept without quibbling.  And then he made the administration give way on a point.

That last point is important: because the last time I checked neither, say, John McCain and/or Lindsey Graham (who I don’t actually particularly dislike) have done as well lately.

Moe Lane

PS: I think that the time has come for Senator McCain to announce that this will be his last term in office.

Speaking *as* a neocon hawk who enjoyed Rand Paul’s filibuster…

…I agree with Allahpundit’s reaction to John McCain’s / Lindsey Graham’s reaction to said filibuster:

You would think Maverick might at least seize the opportunity to note that the guy who beat him five years ago did so in part by campaigning on a lie, but that would mean giving an inch of ground to the isolationists on his own side. So instead he sides with O even though everyone from Reince Priebus to Fox News to the Ron Paul fan base to Jon Stewart is patting Paul on the back, and inexplicably he insists on being nasty about it just in case anyone who enjoyed Paul’s performance hasn’t been completely alienated by McCain yet. Question for my fellow hawks: Is this really the hill to die on vis-a-vis paleocon/libertarian foreign policy? Arguing in favor of a president’s power to fire missiles at an enemy combatant on U.S. soil even if he’s a U.S. citizen and isn’t engaged in terrorism at the time when the FBI could just as easily go in and grab him? If that’s a “wacko bird” position, then a lot of people who agree with it will be left wondering whether the entire mainstream rap on libertarians and paleocons as being “fringe” and “extreme” is a lie. Maverick and Graham need to learn to pick their battles.

Continue reading Speaking *as* a neocon hawk who enjoyed Rand Paul’s filibuster…