Tweet
Reid Goes Nuclear
FrontPage Magazine
Arnold Ahlert
11/22/2013
Excerpt:
On Thursday, 225 years of Senate tradition was cast aside by Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) when he invoked the so-called “nuclear option” and eliminated filibusters against most presidential nominations. “The American people believe Congress is broken. The American people believe the Senate is broken. And I believe they are right,” Reid said Thursday on the Senate floor. “The need for change is so very, very obvious.” What’s just as obvious is the primary motive behind this effort: to tilt an evenly-divided U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit decidedly to the left.
The historic rule change was passed by a vote of 52-48, with three Democrats, Sens. Mark Pryor (D-AK), Joe Manchin (D-WV), and Carl Levin (D-MI), opposing the alteration. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was incensed, not only by the change itself, but the fact that a simple majority of 51 votes was used to change the rule itself, rather than a supermajority of 60 votes that normally applies to Senate rule changes. After accusing Democrats of a power grab, McConnell suggested they will regret their decision when Republicans regain control of the chamber. “We’re not interested in having a gun put to our head any longer,” McConnell said addressing his colleagues form the Senate floor. “Some of us have been around here long enough to know that the shoe is sometimes on the other foot.” Addressing Democrats directly he predicted that they will regret their decision “a lot sooner than you think.”
As of now, the change does not apply to Supreme Court nominations. But on Wednesday, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-IA), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, warned Democrats that if they insisted on changing the rules, the GOP will up the ante when they attain majority status, leaving Democrats no opportunity to filibuster appointments to the nation’s highest court.
The move marks quite a change of heart by Reid. In 2005, when Republicans had a Senate majority and threatened to invoke the nuclear option over stalled nominees, Reid argued passionately against the very same procedure he used yesterday. “They are talking about doing something illegal. They are talking about breaking the rules to change the rules, and that is not appropriate,” he said in April of that year. “That is not fair, and it is not right.” A month later he remained just as adamant. “To change the rules in the Senate can’t be done by a simple majority. It can only be done if there is extended debate by 67 votes,” he insisted.
Thus, it was no surprise that Republicans accused Reid of hypocrisy. Democrats countered that McConnell was ready to support the nuclear option when former Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) wanted to strip the power to filibuster from the Democrat minority eight years ago. The most obvious flaw in the Democrats’ argument is that it never actually happened.
Now that it has happened, courtesy of Reid’s about-face, the three nominations blocked by Republicans from sitting on the nation’s second most powerful court will undoubtedly be confirmed. Those nominees are Patricia Millett, Nina Pillard and Robert Wilkins.
Patricia Millet is by far the most reasonable pick for a spot on the DC Court. She is a former member of the Solicitor General’s Office under both Democratic and Republican administrations, and magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School. She has argued more than 30 cases before the Supreme Court, has advocated for members of the military and their spouses (she is married to a Naval Reservist) and is a woman of faith.
Nina Pillard and Robert Wilkins are entirely different stories. Pillard is a radical feminist who wrote a 2007 law review article contending that abstinence-only sex education is not only “permeated with stereotyped messages and sex-based double standards about acceptable male and female sexual behavior and appropriate social roles,” but that it is unconstitutional. She defines ultrasounds as “deceptive images of fetus-as-autonomous-being that the anti-choice movement has popularized since the advent of amniocentesis.”
Yet perhaps the best example of her radical mindset was her discussion of the Supreme Court case “Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church v. EEOC” at a September 2011 press briefing for Georgetown’s Supreme Court Institute. The case was about the right of the Lutheran Church to choose their religious ministers. She characterized the Church’s position as “a substantial threat to the American rule of law,” and predicted the Court would be unlikely to uphold it. The Court ruled 9-0 in the Church’s favor. Thus, it would not be unreasonable to assume Pillard is to the left of even the most leftist judges on the Supreme Court.
Robert Wilkins’ press release reads like a dream. He received his B.S. from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in 1986 and his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1989. The Legal Times has named him one of the 90 Greatest Washington Lawyers of the Last 30 Years, and he currently practices “corporate defense/white collar, technology, and commercial litigation.”
What Wilkins’ press release fails to mention is that he led an illegal occupation of a Harvard law school building. He and his fellow students demanded a commitment from Harvard to hire 20 women or minority group members over the next four years as tenured or tenure-track professors. Seven of the professors, including four women, were to be black. That protest was undertaken in support of radical bigot Derrick Bell, whose Critical Race Theory posits that America is, and always has been, an intrinsically racist society.
Democrats were primarily frustrated by the Republicans’ use of the filibuster to hold up these nominations, along with the main reason they cited for doing so, which was the assertion that the DC appellate court’s light work load didn’t require additional judges. Republicans further asserted that their aggressiveness with regard to filibustering nominations was exactly the same approach Democrats have taken when they were in the minority.
Harry Reid has now altered the equation entirely.
Unsurprisingly, President Obama supported the move. ”A deliberate and determined effort to obstruct everything, no matter what the merits, just to re-fight the results of an election is not normal, and for the sake of future generations, it cannot become normal,” he said.
.................................................. .......
View the complete article at:
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-...-goes-nuclear/
FrontPage Magazine
Arnold Ahlert
11/22/2013
Excerpt:
On Thursday, 225 years of Senate tradition was cast aside by Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) when he invoked the so-called “nuclear option” and eliminated filibusters against most presidential nominations. “The American people believe Congress is broken. The American people believe the Senate is broken. And I believe they are right,” Reid said Thursday on the Senate floor. “The need for change is so very, very obvious.” What’s just as obvious is the primary motive behind this effort: to tilt an evenly-divided U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit decidedly to the left.
The historic rule change was passed by a vote of 52-48, with three Democrats, Sens. Mark Pryor (D-AK), Joe Manchin (D-WV), and Carl Levin (D-MI), opposing the alteration. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was incensed, not only by the change itself, but the fact that a simple majority of 51 votes was used to change the rule itself, rather than a supermajority of 60 votes that normally applies to Senate rule changes. After accusing Democrats of a power grab, McConnell suggested they will regret their decision when Republicans regain control of the chamber. “We’re not interested in having a gun put to our head any longer,” McConnell said addressing his colleagues form the Senate floor. “Some of us have been around here long enough to know that the shoe is sometimes on the other foot.” Addressing Democrats directly he predicted that they will regret their decision “a lot sooner than you think.”
As of now, the change does not apply to Supreme Court nominations. But on Wednesday, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-IA), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, warned Democrats that if they insisted on changing the rules, the GOP will up the ante when they attain majority status, leaving Democrats no opportunity to filibuster appointments to the nation’s highest court.
The move marks quite a change of heart by Reid. In 2005, when Republicans had a Senate majority and threatened to invoke the nuclear option over stalled nominees, Reid argued passionately against the very same procedure he used yesterday. “They are talking about doing something illegal. They are talking about breaking the rules to change the rules, and that is not appropriate,” he said in April of that year. “That is not fair, and it is not right.” A month later he remained just as adamant. “To change the rules in the Senate can’t be done by a simple majority. It can only be done if there is extended debate by 67 votes,” he insisted.
Thus, it was no surprise that Republicans accused Reid of hypocrisy. Democrats countered that McConnell was ready to support the nuclear option when former Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) wanted to strip the power to filibuster from the Democrat minority eight years ago. The most obvious flaw in the Democrats’ argument is that it never actually happened.
Now that it has happened, courtesy of Reid’s about-face, the three nominations blocked by Republicans from sitting on the nation’s second most powerful court will undoubtedly be confirmed. Those nominees are Patricia Millett, Nina Pillard and Robert Wilkins.
Patricia Millet is by far the most reasonable pick for a spot on the DC Court. She is a former member of the Solicitor General’s Office under both Democratic and Republican administrations, and magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School. She has argued more than 30 cases before the Supreme Court, has advocated for members of the military and their spouses (she is married to a Naval Reservist) and is a woman of faith.
Nina Pillard and Robert Wilkins are entirely different stories. Pillard is a radical feminist who wrote a 2007 law review article contending that abstinence-only sex education is not only “permeated with stereotyped messages and sex-based double standards about acceptable male and female sexual behavior and appropriate social roles,” but that it is unconstitutional. She defines ultrasounds as “deceptive images of fetus-as-autonomous-being that the anti-choice movement has popularized since the advent of amniocentesis.”
Yet perhaps the best example of her radical mindset was her discussion of the Supreme Court case “Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church v. EEOC” at a September 2011 press briefing for Georgetown’s Supreme Court Institute. The case was about the right of the Lutheran Church to choose their religious ministers. She characterized the Church’s position as “a substantial threat to the American rule of law,” and predicted the Court would be unlikely to uphold it. The Court ruled 9-0 in the Church’s favor. Thus, it would not be unreasonable to assume Pillard is to the left of even the most leftist judges on the Supreme Court.
Robert Wilkins’ press release reads like a dream. He received his B.S. from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in 1986 and his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1989. The Legal Times has named him one of the 90 Greatest Washington Lawyers of the Last 30 Years, and he currently practices “corporate defense/white collar, technology, and commercial litigation.”
What Wilkins’ press release fails to mention is that he led an illegal occupation of a Harvard law school building. He and his fellow students demanded a commitment from Harvard to hire 20 women or minority group members over the next four years as tenured or tenure-track professors. Seven of the professors, including four women, were to be black. That protest was undertaken in support of radical bigot Derrick Bell, whose Critical Race Theory posits that America is, and always has been, an intrinsically racist society.
Democrats were primarily frustrated by the Republicans’ use of the filibuster to hold up these nominations, along with the main reason they cited for doing so, which was the assertion that the DC appellate court’s light work load didn’t require additional judges. Republicans further asserted that their aggressiveness with regard to filibustering nominations was exactly the same approach Democrats have taken when they were in the minority.
Harry Reid has now altered the equation entirely.
Unsurprisingly, President Obama supported the move. ”A deliberate and determined effort to obstruct everything, no matter what the merits, just to re-fight the results of an election is not normal, and for the sake of future generations, it cannot become normal,” he said.
.................................................. .......
View the complete article at:
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-...-goes-nuclear/
Comment