FDL is “controversial.”

Move-on are “extremists.”

Daily Kos are “not respectable,” “hatemongers,” and the “worst example of hatred.”

Is this an LSD flashback or have I truly fallen thru the looking glass?

Wait - I never did LSD!

I don’t have time to argue with you, so you’ll be banned after this (see Comment Rules). I will answer briefly. Breyer and Ginsberg were both nominated while Democrats controlled Congress, so the Republican members may have felt there wasn’t much they could do to stop the nominations. Breyer and Ginsberg were considered to be moderates at the time. Republicans accepted the nominations because they had feared Clinton would have nominated someone more liberal.

And, of course, Bush DID get his nominees confirmed, and now it turns out both of ‘em lied out of their asses during the confirmation process (even Arlen Spector acknowledges this) about how they would handle their jobs. And that is why Schumer is saying he’s not going to trust any more of Bush’s nominees, nor should he. The Senate has a responsibility to be sure responsible and HONEST people are confirmed to SCOTUS. This is a duty they shirked when they confirmed Roberts and Alito.

The larger point, however, is that the Senate absolutely does have the Constitutional authority to refuse to confirm a presidential appointment for all offices covered by Article II, section 2, paragraph 2, quoted in the post above, for any reason whatsoever. There is nothing the least bit subversive about this.

“And the amazing thing is that Kool-Aiders like Greg here probably are incapable of seeing the essential dishonesty of their own arguments.)”

What dishonesty are you referring to in my argument? Schumer wants to include ideology in confirmation process. This was not
done in Breyer or Ginsberg confirmations.

From Schumer himself:
Schumer said there were four lessons to
be learned from Alito and Roberts:
Confirmation hearings are meaningless, a
nominee’s record should be weighed more
heavily than rhetoric, “ideology matters”
and “take the president at his word.”

Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear, but what I was referring to specifically was how Breyer and Ginsberg were treated and
contrasting this with how Bork and Thomas were treated.

As for how the Republicans behaved, Clinton was given his nominations, something that Schumer now does not want to give to Bush. On ideological grounds, which is what I suspect that the case was with Bork and Thomas.

Evidently he wants to do the nominations himself. But he is not president. To my recollection, the Republicans did not make
a comparative statement to Schumer’s while they were in the
majority while Clinton was President.

With respect to the filibuster, neither Breyer nor Ginsberg were filibustered even though their views were not to the liking
of conservatives. The Republicans were a minority then, with a
Democrat President. They weren’t “Borked” and they actually received a fair number of Republican votes.

Seems that Bush said, in his Saturday radio address, that the FISA law needs to be overhauled because it is woefully out of date. He’s saying that it was passed in the days before cell phones and the Internet…

Wasn’t this the exact same argument he made for passage of the Patriot Act, which was going to fix all that for him? Then didn’t he say, after passage of the Patriot Act, that all this was in fact fixed?

I seem to remember another round of “before cell phones and the Internet” when he was justifying the NSA spying program.

Does he think we have no memory? Or does he figure that rerun arguments used to extend the Iraq war are working so well, that he might as well use the same tactic here?

Jeeze.

Republicans did not filibuster,
nor treat Clinton’s nominees with
disrespect, as what the Democrats did with
Bork and Thomas.

Excuse me while I roll about on the floor and howl for a moment. Thanks much.

OK, I feel better now. The thing is, son, that what the Republicans did to many of President Clinton’s nominees was worse. They didn’t release nominees out of committee. That means they didn’t have to filibuster to block the nominees, because the names weren’t submitted to the Senate for debate.

This is from the Christian Science Monitor, May 12, 2003:

But until recently, the use of the filibuster to block judicial nominations has been rare: It was used only once by Republicans, to scuttle President Johnson’s 1968 nomination of Abe Fortas as chief justice. Now, Democrats are using filibusters to block Bush nominees Miguel Estrada and Priscilla Owen to federal appellate courts. [That’s two nominees, notice. — maha] …

…Both sides blame the other for making such decisions partisan, and there’s plenty of evidence to support either side. In a Rose Garden speech on Friday, President Bush charged that the judicial confirmation process is “broken,” noting that eight of his first 11 nominees to the Federal Appeals Court waited more than a year for a vote on the Senate floor; three more are now into year three.

Democrats counter that they have, in fact, approved 124 of the president’s nominees, while blocking only two. That’s faster than Republicans moved President Clinton’s nominees when they controlled the Senate. Moreover, some 60 Clinton nominees never had a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee - as effective a block to confirmation as a filibuster, they add.

“When the White House wants to show some degree of moderation, the system works well,” says Sen. Charles Schumer (D) of New York, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The Senate Rules Committee is expected to take up the proposed rule change as early as this week. It lowers the number of votes required to end debate from 60 to a simple majority by increments. Spokesmen for Senator Frist say he is hoping his proposal will set off a “high level debate” in the Senate on how to solve the filibuster problem.

That’s when the real fight could begin. “If there’s anything that senators consider to be at the very core of their personal power,” says Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University, “it’s judicial nominations.”

(Of course, the talking point the Right will crank out will be about the filibuster, which at least goes on in the open Senate, rather than the practice of GOP committee chairs just sitting on Clinton nominations and not releasing them to the Senate at all. And the amazing thing is that Kool-Aiders like Greg here probably are incapable of seeing the essential dishonesty of their own arguments.)

Now Schumer is advocating a Senate veto
over the President’s nominations.

That’s the Senate’s right. It has always been the Senate’s right. It’s in the Constitution, as I explained in the post. The President must receive the consent of the Senate for certain nominations to be confirmed, and the consent of the Senate doesn’t mean squat if it doesn’t have the authority to say no now and then. The Senate should not function as a rubber stamp, or else the separation of powers is meaningless.

IIRC, the Republicans didn’t need to. They kept most of Clinton’s nominees bottled up in committee. I don’t have the numbers before me, but there were a lot of judicial positions that remained open for a long time because of this.

What the Republicans have done in the past is to judge the
qualifications of the nominees only. Schumer now wants to include ideology…

Do you really believe this? The Republicans, non-ideological? You have got to be kidding. This is pure propaganda, the Republicans as innocent lambs.

As I see it, both sides want their own on the Supreme Court, and both sides to varying degrees have done what they could to game the process to achieve this end. I don’t see anyting wrong with Schumer advocating what the Constitution says the Senate should be doing all along.

“The Right, of course, has never even
thought about placing people to their own
ideological liking on the Court.”

Of course conservatives want people of own
liking on the court. The thing that is
different here is how the nominees of the
President get treated by the respective
parties. Republicans did not filibuster,
nor treat Clinton’s nominees with
disrespect, as what the Democrats did with
Bork and Thomas.

With respect to what Schumer said:
“We should reverse the presumption of
confirmation,” Schumer told the American
Constitution Society convention in
Washington.

Now Schumer is advocating a Senate veto
over the President’s nominations. This
is an expansion upon the tactics
mentioned above. What the Republicans
have done in the past is to judge the
qualifications of the nominees only.
Schumer now wants to include ideology.
Even though Ginsberg and Breyer were not
to our ideological liking, they were not
filibustered nor vetoed by the Republicans
in the Senate. Nor were they treated
with disrespect for nothing more than
having political differences.

This appears to be a power grab. Ironic
that the Democrats are accusing the
President of this while attempting it
themselves.