Tag Archives: US Senate

national news

Enter the Three Stooges

It is tempting, I suppose, to attach some sort of label to three U.S. senators who “distinguished” themselves with their pitiful performances at the Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing for Ketanji Brown Jackson, selected by President Biden to join the Supreme Court.

Three Amigos? Nah! Three Musketeers? Nope.

How about … Three Stooges? Yeah, that’s the ticket!

Sens. Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley all were disgraceful in their own respective ways as they sought to tear down a distinguished jurist’s record by ascribing all sorts of phony nefarious motives to decisions she made from the bench and in practice as a public defender.

They all sickened me. Yes, I am on record as wanting Judge Jackson to take her place on the nation’s highest court. I also am on record as loathing the way Republican senators reacted initially to President Biden’s selection of Judge Jackson and then to the way they behaved during the confirmation hearing.

I will hold out a sliver of hope that some GOP senators — maybe two of ’em — will see fit to confirm her when the full Senate casts its vote.

As for the Three Stooges — two of whom (Hawley and Cruz) apparently want to run for POTUS in 2024 — I just will be content to scoff at their antics and to hope eventually they all get booted out of the Senate. I don’t want any of them voting on laws that affect my family and me.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news

Hearing previews 2024 campaign

Ladies and gentlemen, I am prepared to declare that we are witnessing with the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on whether Ketanji Brown Jackson should join the Supreme Court a preview of the 2024 Republican Party presidential primary.

It’s an unattractive spectacle and I detest the notion that a respected jurist is being used as a political football by senators who might seek their party’s presidential nomination in 2024.

I’m talking about Ted Cruz of Texas, Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Josh Hawley of Missouri.

They are trying to push hot-button issues dealing with race and abortion and trying to appease the nut-job “base” of the GOP voting bloc while they grill Judge Jackson.

To the nominee’s great credit, she is holding up well under the onslaught.

President Biden promised to present a highly qualified nominee to succeed Justice Stephen Breyer. He delivered when he nominated Judge Jackson.

I continue to salute Jackson’s former role as a public defender. The Supreme Court hasn’t yet welcomed a jurist with that kind of background. Jackson has talked about understanding a defendant’s mindset and the value that understanding has brought to her experience for the past decade as a judge. That aspect of her background alone would bring remarkable and laudatory diversity to the nation’s highest court.

That, of course, won’t stop the GOP presidential hopefuls from parsing her past comments and seeking to damage her reputation by suggesting things about Judge Jackson that do not exist.

From my vantage point, they are embarrassing themselves and have been unable to lay a hand on the nominee’s stellar standing.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news

Inquisition begins

Here it comes. U.S. Senate Republicans bent on derailing Judge Ketanji Jackson Brown’s nomination to join the U.S. Supreme Court have begun digging up issues they hope will send President Biden’s historic selection into the ditch.

It won’t happen. Still, beginning next week we’ll get to listen to GOP critics of the judge look for all they’re worth on something, anything that will gum up the works.

Sen. Josh Hawley, the Missouri lawmaker who infamously gave the closed-fist salute to the traitors gathering to storm the Capitol Building on 1/6, has tossed out the first rhetorical grenade. He accuses Judge Jackson of giving child molesters a free pass during her time as a federal public defender.

Interesting, yes? I believe it is. So, I pulled out my pocket version of the U.S. Constitution that sits on my man-cave desk at home and turned to the Sixth Amendment. It says, in part: In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial … and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.” There are some other things in the middle of that amendment, but I wanted to share the relevant portion of it with you here.

My point is that Judge Jackson was, um, following the law and was obedient to the U.S. Constitution by providing “the Assistance of Counsel” for defendants who couldn’t afford to hire a high-priced lawyer.

This is how the opposition is going to attack Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. Foes of hers and of the president will look for segments of her stellar legal background and will twist it beyond anything recognizable under the law.

Joe Biden promised he would find a qualified jurist to succeed Justice Stephen Breyer, who is retiring at the end of the court’s term. The president pledged to nominate the first African American woman to the bench. He succeeded on both counts. Judge Jackson is eminently qualified and, oh yes, she happens to be Black.

Neither truth about this nominee is going to deter the critics from digging up nonsense in their opposition to her nomination. Josh Hawley has paved a fool’s trail for the rest of the GOP critics to follow.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news

SCOTUS to get kicked around?

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Mitch McConnell has demonstrated a clear ability — and a tendency — to play hardball politics whenever the need arises in his own pointed head.

Think about how the Senate Republican leader can manipulate things in the event the GOP takes control of the U.S. Senate after the 2022 midterm election.

Supreme Court Justice Steven Breyer might retire from the court. Say, he does so at the end of the current term, which arrives in late June or early July 2022. President Biden has to select a nominee immediately after such a retirement occurs. McConnell well might decide to throw up roadblocks anticipating a GOP takeover of the Senate in November 2022.

What might occur, then, if the GOP wins a Senate majority, seats a new Senate in January 2023 and Biden’s SCOTUS nominee still hasn’t had a hearing, let alone a vote? I’ll tell you what’ll happen. The GOP-led Senate could scuttle a Biden choice and then McConnell could decide to replay the tactic he used in 2016 when Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly. President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland to the court, but McConnell torpedoed the nomination, refusing to grant Garland a hearing. Why? Because we had an election months away and McConnell said the next president deserved the right to select someone. The next president happened to be Donald J. Trump and, well, you know the rest of it.

This all seems to give a Breyer decision on whether he stays on the court a good bit more of a time urgency. I don’t expect Justice Breyer to act on the wishes of others around him. He is entitled to walk away on his own terms and on his own schedule.

The nation’s highest court, though, does not need or deserve to be kicked around like the political football some in the Senate have made it out to be.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

political news

Mend, don’t end, filibuster

As a general rule I am inclined to oppose ridding the U.S. Senate of the filibuster, which gives senators in the minority a way to block legislation they oppose.

However, I am strongly in favor of amending the Senate rule. Instead of allowing a single senator to “filibuster” a bill simply by signing on to a measure to block it, the Senate needs to require senators to stand on the floor and talk the bill to death.

Make ’em hold the floor for as long as they can while they blab and blather on and on. That’s the way filibusters used to occur. Senators would yap and yammer for hours on end, collapsing at times, while they sought to talk legislation into oblivion.

Democrats want to rid the Senate of the filibuster. Republicans are standing firm in their support of the legislative rule. What might happen, though, after the 2022 election if Republicans get control of the Senate, pushing Democrats into the minority?

I can see a scenario where Republicans would want to deny Democrats a tool to block legislation, while Democrats would perform a one-80 and seek to keep the rule intact.

It’s not written into the U.S. Constitution. The filibuster is a Senate rule. It has been abused by senators who “filibuster” legislation without ever having to talk it to death. Make them use the rule the way it was intended.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Joe Biden

POTUS dons legislator’s hat

This thought occurs to me, so I’ll share it briefly.

President Biden is trying to negotiated a legislative deal with moderate and progressive congressional Democrats. Then the following dawned on me.

Biden spent 36 years in the U.S. Senate. He then spent eight years as vice president. That’s 44 years negotiating experience with lawmakers.

The way I figure it, President Biden is the most experienced legislator in the meetings he is having with congressional Democrats. He knows how to cajole, coddle and convince legislators to do what’s right.

If only he could work his legislative skill on congressional Republicans who — sad to say — just won’t wheel and deal with a master of wheeling and dealing.

This is the value of having a POTUS who knows how government works. Let’s see if it pays off.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Joe Biden

Biden: born for this job?

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

As I watch President Biden perform certain ceremonial functions — or even simply walk to and from the Oval Office or climb the steps leading onto Air Force One — I am struck by a recurring thought.

It is that this man has wanted the job he now holds for practically as long as he has been a national public figure. That goes back a good while.

He burst on the national scene as a freshman U.S. senator from Delaware. He won election in 1972; Biden was just 29 years of age when they declared him the winner, but would turn 30 (the minimum legal age to serve as a senator) between Election Day and his swearing in.

It is a fairly open secret that he lusted for higher office from almost the very beginning. Biden had to endure intense personal tragedy before taking office in 1973. His wife and infant daughter died in a car crash; his sons, Beau and Hunter, were gravely injured. They would recover.

Biden would remarry five years later.

He ran for president in 1988. Then he tasted humiliation when he got caught plagiarizing the remarks of a British politician, using the British pol’s life story as his own. Sen. Biden bowed out. He would run again for POTUS in 2008, but then quit after being steamrolled by the eventual Democratic nominee, Sen. Barack Obama — who then selected him to run with him as vice president. They won. They served two successful terms.

Now it’s the Joe Biden Show in the White House.

I just am filled with the strong sense that President Biden has been in a sort of training for half a century to do the job he is now doing.

My critique? He’s quite good at acting like a president. He sounds like a president. He behaves like a president.

After enduring the clumsiness, the chaos, the confusion and the cockamamie pronouncements of the president’s immediate predecessor, all this “normal” stuff seems quite, well … refreshing.

national news

Juneteenth receives deserved honor

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Texas has celebrated this glorious day for decades.

Now it’s time for the rest of the nation to join us.

Juneteenth will become the nation’s latest national holiday once President Biden puts his name on the legislation that sailed through the Senate unanimously and through the House in overwhelmingly bipartisan fashion.

It becomes the first national holiday since Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday was declared such in 1983.

I am delighted as a Texas resident to see this state take a front-and-center place in this discussion. June 19, 1865 was the day that African-Americans were informed in Galveston that they were, indeed, free from enslavement; the announcement came two years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. News didn’t travel nearly as fast as it should have in those days … you know?

Cornyn calls GOP lawmaker’s position against Juneteenth ‘kooky’ (msn.com)

And so, with the exception of 14 GOP knuckleheads in the House, virtually the entire legislative branch of government is on board in that rare bipartisan event.

This day deserves the honor it is about to receive, as do the descendants of those who were declared finally free of humanity’s greatest sin.

environmental news

Green New Deal is back!

 

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Just in time, a newer version of legislation that got stalled a couple of years ago in the U.S. Senate, has returned to the center stage of environmental policy discussion.

The Green New Deal — the bogeyman of the Republican Party — has been reintroduced by U.S. Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York; indeed, AOC herself has become a favorite target of GOP critics.

Why is this so timely? Because we have Earth Day coming up Thursday. It’s the one day of the year — as if we should dedicate just a single day — we call attention to the fragility of the only planet we can inhabit.

I’ll save a discussion on the nuts and bolts of the Green New Deal for another day. I do want to make a point about the importance of what the GND intends to accomplish. It seeks to preserve our environment, to retain Earth as a place where human beings can inhabit.

President Biden has made climate change one of the linchpins of his tenure in office. He appointed former U.S. Sen. and Secretary of State John Kerry as a special international envoy on climate change. The president signed an executive order upon taking office to return the United States to the Paris Climate Accord, from which Donald Trump had walked away when he took office.

Climate change presents an existential threat to our national security. Never mind the spring chill that has swept across the nation in recent days. The evidence continues to show that Earth’s median temperatures continue to increase year over year. Ice caps are melting. Sea levels are rising. Third World nations continue to fell millions of acres of forest each year. The industrialized nations of the world continue to pour millions of tons of carbon-related pollutants into the air.

We must find some answers to these crises. Many of us say it when Earth Day rolls around every year: We only have one planet … and we have to protect it.

Is the Green New Deal too much? Too little? I don’t know. However, I believe we must not continue to do what we have been doing. We are contributing to the destruction of our Good Earth.

national news

Filibuster? Yes, but make ’em talk!

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Senate Democrats and progressives around the country want to eliminate the filibuster from Senate procedure.

They contend it is being abused by the Republican minority in the “world’s greatest deliberative body.” I am not going to join that chorus. I don’t have a particular problem with the filibuster, other than the way it is implemented now.

Senators can declare a filibuster is in effect when they object to legislation. Then they go about their business as if nothing is happening.

If they’re going to filibuster, they should be forced to stand on the Senate floor and talk their lungs out in an effort to kill legislation. Make ’em blab about this and/or that, which is what the filibuster was designed initially to require.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said recently he would talk until he “fell over.” I might pay real American money to see that happen.

The filibuster is aimed to protect the interests of the political minority. At the moment, the GOP is the minority party. One day they might regain control of the Senate, although I don’t particularly want that to happen. What happens then, if the Senate kills the filibuster now, disallowing future political minorities from exercising the long-standing Senate rule?

The filibuster wasn’t written into the Constitution; it was enacted under Senate rule-making authority. Getting rid of it only solves the issue of the moment. The balance of power has this way of swinging back and forth.

If we keep the filibuster, by all means then make senators stand in the well and bluster and bloviate until they do fall over.