Keep This In Mind When You're In The Minority, Democrats

Senate Dems use new power to confirm nominee, tilt appeals court

December 10, 2013
Senate Democrats on Tuesday muscled through the confirmation of a key judicial nominee, in the first such vote since they weakened the chamber's filibuster rules and undermined the power of the minority party.

Senators voted 56-38 to approve Washington lawyer Patricia Millett to join the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the nation's second most powerful court.

Amid objections from Republicans, the vote now sets the stage for a series of votes on nominees who otherwise could have had a tough time getting confirmed.

Both sides saw Millett's appointment as pivotal. It will give Democratic-appointed judges a 5-4 majority over those chosen by Republican presidents for that court, which rules on the legality of White House actions and federal agency regulations.

"I'm confident she will serve with distinction on the federal bench," President Obama said in a statement.

Until recently, it would have taken a coalition of 60 senators to advance Millett's nomination. But Majority Leader Harry Reid pushed through changes, to the dismay of Republicans, that would allow most judicial and executive nominees to advance and get approved with just 51 votes.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/201...-power-to-confirm-nominee-tilt-appeals-court/

 

The filthy, underhanded Democrats won't be in power forever and they will regret the day they passed this change once Republicans gain control again. It's a two-way street you stinking Democrats and you've opened Pandora's box with this one. Reid should never have allowed this to happen, but he's a rotten-to-the-core Democrat so what do we expect? November, 2014 can't come too soon as far as I'm concerned. Voters are going to put the Democrats in their place because of tactics like this. Absolutely, utterly disgusting.

 

I think you mean fill vacant court seats. I could just as easily have started a thread that said, "Repukes filibuster appointments to preserve their court influence in spite of how the law works" and it would be far, far closer to the actual situation. But please, by all means, keep being indignant about your obstructionism. It is really funny. And don't forget to keep prophesizing the eventual return of the GOP majority. The way old white guys are dying in droves from one election to the next, I'm sure that will be a big problem for the Dems. Too funny.

 

Oh, we're so scared. The way you losers keep losing women, minorities, gays, and old white people dying off, not to mention the Tea Party draining the crazies, I laugh at your warning. This is the final nail in your obstructionist coffins. Good riddance.

 

I found this most interesting.

Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/Politics/reid-sununu-invoke-option/2013/12/09/id/540838#ixzz2nBGMiv4k​

 

Ye----ah!
View attachment 2156

Maybe unprecedented obstructionism has a cost? Abuse of the filibuster started the war. It wasn't the changing of the Senate rules that began this. Think about that next time.

7 appointments vs. 15 appointments since Carter. Who is really packing the courts?

 

I found this most interesting.

The Nullification Strategy: How Senate Republicans Abuse the Filibuster to Undermine the Courts, Executive Agencies, and American Voters

To: Interested Parties
From: Marge Baker, Executive Vice President, People For the American Way
Date: November 12, 2013
Re: The Nullification Strategy: How Senate Republicans Abuse the Filibuster to Undermine the Courts, Executive Agencies, and American Voters
Earlier this month, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the Dean of the Senate and one of the most steadfast protectors of its traditions, announced that for the first time in his decades-long Senate career he was considering supporting a change to the Senate’s filibuster rules.
Leahy’s reluctant change of heart is a sign of the extent to which Senate Republicans have abused the rules of the Senate not only to oppose legislation and nominees with whom they disagree, but to change the rules of government, using obstruction to nullify laws and agencies that they lack the electoral mandate to overturn or eliminate through legitimate means.
Senate Republicans under President Obama have turned the Constitution's command of "advice and consent" into a prerogative to obstruct and nullify -- a violation of the Constitution's spirit that ignores the will of American voters and threatens to undermine the functioning of all three branches of government.
Using what Sen. Tim Kaine has called the "decapitation strategy," Senate Republicans routinely deny confirmation votes to qualified, widely respected nominees simply because the GOP wants to cripple the agency or court to which the individual was nominated.
This strategy will reach a new low today if Senate Republicans succeed in blocking an up-or-down vote on the nomination of Nina Pillard to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, as they have indicated that they intend to do.
How the Nullification Strategy Works
In June, President Obama nominated three highly qualified individuals to fill the three vacancies on the D.C. Circuit Court. On Oct. 31, Republicans blocked a vote on the nomination of Patricia Millett. Today, they are expected to deny cloture on the nomination of Nina Pillard. And they have indicated that they will do the same to President Obama's third nominee to the court, Robert Wilkins.
Senate Republicans have made clear that they are blocking votes on these nominees simply because they do not want President Obama to be able to fill vacancies on this particular court. In fact, the Senate’s GOP leadership signaled their intention to stonewall all three nominees before they even knew who they would be – a clear sign that their obstruction has nothing to do with the nominees’ records or qualifications.
Similarly, Republicans blocked President Obama’s nominees to the National Labor Relations Board, preventing the agency from achieving a quorum; in so doing, they successfully sabotaged enforcement of the National Labor Relations Act without actually amending the law. They refused for a full two years to confirm a head to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which prevented it from exercising some of its most important authorities; they admitted they had no problem with the nominee (Richard Cordray) but instead wanted to force Democrats to change the law and weaken the newly-created agency.
And of course, President Obama's nominee to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Rep. Mel Watt of North Carolina, is in the same position after Senate Republicans blocked a vote on his nomination, making him the first sitting member of Congress to be blocked from confirmation to an Administration position since before the Civil War.
Notably, a large number of the nominees who have faced politically-motivated blockades have been women and people of color. The blocked D.C. Circuit nominees are two women and an African-American man. Several months ago, Republicans blocked another woman, Caitlin Halligan, from a seat on the court, which will make Pillard the third woman this year that Republicans have blocked from the D.C. Circuit.
Why Republicans Have Targeted the D.C. Circuit
There is a reason that Senate Republicans have chosen the D.C. Circuit as an object of their obstruction: The court, which regularly reviews decisions by federal agencies on a broad range of issues important to the public at large, is currently dominated by Republican-nominated jurists who routinely undercut the ability of federal agencies to protect workers and consumers.
Although the court's eight active judges are divided evenly between Democratic and Republican nominees, five of the court’s six senior judges are Republican appointees. These senior judges sit on the three-judge panels that do most of the court’s work, and maintain a strong influence over the court. So when you draw a three-judge panel, there’s a high likelihood that it will have a conservative majority because Republican nominees outnumber Democratic ones 9-5, a nearly 2-1 ratio. In fact, 15 of the last 19 judges confirmed to the court were nominated by Republican presidents. That includes four George W. Bush nominees, three George H.W. Bush nominees, and eight Ronald Reagan nominees. By contrast, the Senate has confirmed just one of President Obama's nominees to the D.C. Circuit, Sri Srinivasan.

 

I don't know if it's made the national news yet or not but in KY there was a special election held yesterday to fill a vacant State Rep seat (the dim who stepped down due to allegations of sexual harrassment had held the seat since 1995). The entire campaign boiled down to the dim trying to distance herself from previous public support of Obamacare & the the Repub making it THE issue of the election. Bottom line? The Repub candidate won in a close race. Some observers are calling the win the first indication of things to come...

 

Cont'ed..

The conservative judges who currently dominate the D.C. Circuit have pushed an anti-regulatory, pro-corporate ideological agenda that clearly appeals to Senate Republicans. In just the past few years, Republican-nominated judges on the court have blocked EPA efforts to limit cross-state air pollution, defeated cigarette labeling requirements, and used severely flawed reasoning to declare that requiring employers to post a notice informing employees of their right to unionize violates the free speech rights of the employers. The D.C. Circuit has also aided Senate Republicans in their agenda of obstruction, voiding the president’s appointments of NRLB Members whom the president had been forced to recess-appoint after the GOP had refused to let the agency reach a quorum.
After he voted to block Millett’s nomination, Republican Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois admitted that preserving the DC Circuit’s rightward slant was the reason for his party’s obstruction. "We're worried about that court being a significant bastion for administrative law cases on Obamacare,” he told the Huffington Post.
President Obama's nominees to fill the three vacancies on the D.C. Circuit are all impeccably qualified. Judge Wilkins is already a federal judge, serving on the US District Court for the District of Columbia, and has an impressive background in civil rights and financial law. Professor Pillard is a widely respected attorney who has personally argued and briefed key Supreme Court cases – including key women’s equality cases -- brought or defended by government lawyers from Republican administrations, and Republican-appointed justices often authored the majority opinions in her favor. She co-directs a universally admired nonpartisan institute that prepares attorneys to argue before the Supreme Court. Millett is one of the most respected appellate attorneys in the nation, and has argued dozens of cases before the Supreme Court.
Yet all three are facing filibusters simply because they were nominated by President Obama.
Stunningly, Senate Republicans have attempted to turn the tables on the president, accusing him of "court-packing" for attempting to fill congressionally-designated judicial vacancies with qualified nominees. This argument is laughably transparent: President Obama has nominated qualified individuals to seats that have been filled by all of his recent predecessors, even when the court's caseload was lower than it is today.
The Constitution mandates that the president name and the Senate fairly review nominees to federal judgeships created by Congress. President Obama has done his job by nominating three extraordinarily qualified nominees to the D.C. Circuit. But the Senate GOP is refusing to fulfill its duty of "advice and consent,” and is instead attempting to nullify the law and pretend the court has only eight seats.
This is the same strategy that House Republicans used when they shut down the federal government and threatened a default on the country’s debt in an attempt to bring down a law that had been enacted by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court. Unable to achieve their preferred policies by winning elections, Republicans are attempting to nullify the results of those elections through extreme obstruction.
This abuse of the filibuster has now led even one of the Senate's most fervent institutionalists to consider eliminating the minority's ability to block nominees -- a fundamental change to an institution that less than ten years ago agreed to use the filibuster only under "extraordinary circumstances."
Senate Republicans must reconsider their nullification strategy, or risk harming not only the courts and executive agencies they are targeting, but the institution of the Senate itself.

http://www.pfaw.org/press-releases/...e-republicans-abuse-filibuster-undermine-cour

 

I don't know if this made national news or not but in Tenn...

Lamar Alexander top aide Ryan Loskarn investigated for child porn


By BURGESS EVERETT and JOHN BRESNAHAN | 12/11/13 11:58 AM EST Updated: 12/11/13 3:58 PM EST

Law enforcement agents have searched the home of GOP Sen. Lamar Alexander’s chief of staff over allegations of child pornography, according to a statement released by the senator’s office.
Jesse Ryan Loskarn, who goes by his middle name, was removed from his home in handcuffs by federal agents shortly before 1 p.m. on Wednesday and driven away in an unmarked car. Agents from the U.S. Postal Service were on the scene at Loskarn’s home in southeast Washington, D.C. in the Hill East neighborhood on a quiet, tree-lined block of rowhouses near the
Lamar Alexander's top aide investigated


Loskarn did not respond to shouted questions from television reporters.

Agents put several bags of evidence and a computer in a postal inspector SUV. Agents also went to Alexander’s Senate office and sought access to Loskarn’s work computer, a Senate source said.
The Tennessee senator immediately placed Loskarn on administrative leave. Loskarn is one of the most well-known Hill staffers and an influential policy aide. He is also very well-liked in the Senate, and the small community of those who work on the Hill was shocked by the news.
“I was just informed by the United States Senate legal counsel’s office that law enforcement agents are conducting a search of the personal residence of Ryan Loskarn, the chief of staff of my Washington, D.C., office regarding allegations involving child pornography,” Alexander said. “I am stunned, surprised and disappointed by what I have learned.
(PHOTOS: Top congressional scandals)
“Based on this information, I immediately placed Mr. Loskarn on administrative leave without pay. The office is fully cooperating with the investigation.”
Priscilla Carver, a witness who lives just a few dozen feet from Loskarn’s home, said seven agents arrived right before 7 a.m. banging on the door and yelling. They were accompanied by four unmarked cars, and police tape was put up — which was later removed. Agents left the area a few minutes after 1 p.m. Wednesday.
Loskarn, 35, is from Sykesville, Md., according to the congressional staffing database LegiStorm. He graduated from Tulane University in 2000 and has been working on Capitol Hill for Republicans ever since, according to his LinkedIn page.
A longtime Alexander aide, Loskarn was named his chief of staff in 2012.
Including working at the Senate Republican Conference under Alexander and former Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) as both chief of staff and communications director, Loskarn also worked for Reps. Wally Herger (R-Calif.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), as well as the House Rules Committee.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/ryan-loskarn-investigated-101016.html#ixzz2nCkfsqqT

 

When they were in the Senate, both Obama and Biden were against the very tactic that Reid and the Democrat senators used, the so-called "nuclear option". Be truthful for a moment, Little Joe and tell us how you would have felt had the then-majority Republicans used the exact same tactic Reid used.

 

How did "Court Appointments" get to "Child Porn"?

 

Joe can't keep track of more than one thing at at time. Don't try to confuse him.

 

I'm laughing in your face right now, you stupid prick. The GOP gained the majority in 2014 just as I predicted (and WHAT a majority!) contrary to what you were spewing. How does it feel, dumbass? The gist of this, however, is that "what goes around comes around". I hope to all that's holy that the Republicans use the same tactic Reid did and repeal Obamacare. What would you say to that?

http://nation.foxnews.com/2014/11/1...1-vote-maneuver-used-pass-obamacare-repeal-it

 

Good. Stay scared. I love it.

 

bump

 

It's only a matter of a few weeks until Republicans gain control of the Senate (in addition to keeping their control of the House). Once that happens, the "shoe will be on the other foot" and Democrats will have much to answer for. They're not going to like some of the things that will be imposed upon them, but that's simply too bad. They brought this about themselves and I have absolutely no sympathy for them.

Man, this was a GREAT election!!!