Jonah Goldberg:
Throughout its history, the United States Senate has experienced disgraceful filibusters (Strom Thurmond against the 1957 Civil Rights Act), entertaining filibusters (Huey Long in 1935 reciting a fried-oyster recipe) and symbolic filibusters (Rand Paul making a point about drone strikes in 2013). But the filibuster that Chuck Schumer is about to undertake against Judge Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court is perhaps the institution’s dumbest.
It won’t block Gorsuch, won’t establish any important jurisprudential principle, and won’t advance Democratic strategic goals — indeed the opposite. A Gorsuch filibuster would be an act of a sheer partisan pique against the wrong target, with the wrong method, at the wrong time.
The Democratic effort to portray Judge Gorsuch as out of the mainstream has fallen flat. He has the support of President Barack Obama’s former solicitor general Neal Katyal. He got the American Bar Association’s highest rating. He’s been endorsed by USA Today. He will receive the votes of at least three Democratic senators. Some radical.
From the moment of his announcement by President Donald Trump to the very last question at his confirmation hearings, Gorsuch has been an exemplary performer, whose deep knowledge has been matched by his winning temperament. The attack on him as an enemy of the little man is based on a few decisions where he clearly followed the law, even though it resulted in an unsympathetic outcome.
Much has been made of a case involving a driver for TransAm Trucking who had pulled over on the side of the road in freezing temperatures and, fearing for his safety, drove off in defiance of a direct order of a supervisor. Days later, he was fired. Alphonse Maddin claimed that the company had violated a whistleblower protection under federal law. In a dissent from the decision of the Tenth Circuit, Gorsuch carefully argued that the statute’s protections didn’t apply to the trucker, although he stipulated that “it might be fair to ask whether TransAm’s decision was a wise or kind one.”
If Schumer upholds the filibuster against Gorsuch — and it looks like he has the votes — Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell will almost certainly exercise the so-called nuclear option eliminating the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations. Schumer portrays this as an act of procedural vandalism against the Senate, although he has no standing as vindicator of Senate tradition.
The demac-RATS want another Eric(the Dread)Holder in there like they did under Obama Been Lying who will ignore the U.S. Constitution and enforce the ICC(Internationa Crinimal Court)upon americans who would violate some unconstitutional Useless Nations treaty tried by forgiegn judges and sent to some concentration camp or gulag as ordaned by the Useless Nations and the ICC treaty signed by King William the Rapists
Hi, Curt…..been some years……I see most the old guard is gone….they were all very gifted…..
Before the election, the Democrats were doing a jig, much like the one Hitler did outside Paris, as they were supremely confident they had the whole she-bang in the bag….no way they could lose…….
They were slavering, not only at the anticipation of continuing their Leftist policies for the next four years, but tilting the Supreme Court over into liberal la-la land….
Then, lo and behold! In a modern day version of the Tortoise and the Hare, that underdog, that crazy, raving racist scoundrel, Trump came from behind (if he ever was actually behind) and actually defeated the Democratic shoo-in for President, Hillary Clinton!…
Thus, with polls practically guaranteeing the Democrats the win, they lost it all…thus enter Russia………had to….no way they could face themselves in the mirror, or their base, every morning unless they were made to lose the election as the result diabolical shenanigans….heaven forbid it might be due to their policies…..
Then comes the “unmasking”, for since Trump was in cohorts with the Russians, and Russia interfered to give Trump the win, the whole contrived issue was then construed to be one of national security and anything the Trump administration was doing was deemed by the Democrats, and their cohorts in the security agencies, as illegitimate and illegal….thus any means necessary to intercept the ‘possibility’ of ‘illegal’ doings within the Trump administration, was warranted….
Now comes the “filibuster”…..the Democrats are going to try to make this happen and the result will be the Republicans will extend the ‘Nuclear Option’ already brought about by the Democrats themselves (based upon their illusion that they would be perpetually in power from that point on) to Supreme Court nominees.
Good for them.
Any person would be hard pressed to make a rational argument that the Democrats set up the nuclear option for lower court judges, but not Supreme Court judges, due to their heavy moral rectitude….
Are we supposed to believe that those two moronic females put in by that Zero, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, two liberal rubber stamps, are confirmable, but Gorsuch is not because he is a Constitutionalist and does not conform to the Leftist “evolving constitution” tripe as does Kagan and Sotomayor?
Fact of the matter is, as has been noted:”If Judge Gorsuch cannot be confirmed without the nuclear option, no constitutionalist judge can be confirmed.”
The only judge the Democrats will support is another Merrick Garland, as they are still smarting over the fact that Garland was not brought forward. the last year of the Zero presidency….even though the Democrats themselves have done it to the Republicans in the past…….
“Don’t do as we do….do as we say..”
@Esdraelon:
did you know that the left has now advancing the concept the milk is racist because it is white.