Tag Archives: Senate GOP

legal news, national news, political news

Justice Sandoval, anyone?

sandoval

You’ve got to hand it to the White House media machine.

It puts out a report that has Washington all a-flutter, even if it appears to be the longest of long shots.

Or is it?

Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval is being considered for that coveted spot on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Two things about Sandoval make this a remarkable consideration.

One: He is a former U.S. district judge whom the Senate confirmed overwhelmingly.

Two: He is a Republican.

Sandoval being vetted

It’s the second part of Sandoval’s resume that is most intriguing.

GOP senators, led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have said they won’t consider anyone for the spot that President Obama wants to fill to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

But are they really and truly going to slam the door shut on one of their own Republicans, someone they’ve endorsed already for a lower court post?

Sandoval is reportedly a moderate Republican. That, of course, doesn’t fit the profile desired by so many of the hard-right senators who will have to vote on whomever the president selects.

The chatter already has suggested that the president is going to nominate a centrist. He’ll forgo an ideological battle in order to get someone seated.

Gov. Sandoval is a long way from being nominated, let alone being considered for the job.

It makes me wonder: Is the president trying to stick it in the ear of the folks with whom he’s been fighting throughout his entire presidency?

 

 

 

legal news, national news, political news

Oh, that silly thing called ‘public comment’

bidenjoe_102015getty

A member of my family challenged me earlier today to recall a statement from a politician that seemed to contradict what President Obama has said about his upcoming nomination for someone to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

The president wants the Republican-controlled Senate to give the nomineeĀ a fair and thorough hearing and then a vote in a “timely fashion.” Democrats are angry that GOP senators are pledging that whoever gets the nod won’t get a committee hearing, let alone a vote.

One of those angry Democrats is Vice President Joe Biden.

Oh, but wait. He said something different in 1992 when a Republican was president. Then-Sen. Biden said President George H.W. Bush shouldn’t get a Supreme Court nominee approved in an election year.

My family member brought that statement to my attention and asked me whether I opposed it then.

My answer? I couldn’t remember the statement, let alone what I thought about it at the time.

White House defends Biden

The vice president has said that the statement has been “taken out of context.” Biden says that he added later in his Senate floor remarks that he’d consider a nominee if he or she were a moderate; Biden chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time.

I, too, believe the Senate should consider a presidential appointment to the Supreme Court to fill the vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

Which brings me back to where we started.

We hear so many things through so many channels, venues, forums and information-delivery systems that most of us can’t remember who said what, when they said it and in what context they said it.

If I’d heard itĀ at the time I likely would have condemned it. However, that’s a hypothetical event, which politicians say they dislike. I’ll concede that I probably didn’t hear Sen. Biden say what he’s now acknowledged he said.

Sure, Biden would be wrong — if he favored obstructing future high court nominations and left it at that. He says now he had more to say than what’s being reported.

Fine …

None of thisĀ justifies today’s Senate leadership vow to obstruct the current president from filling a seat on the Supreme Court.

legal news, national news, political news

Act on the president’s court nominee

gettyimages-505901208-6ba58e5bee050257b43c9d62a921035a661e4702-s900-c85

I remain strongly in support of presidential prerogative.

It’s been one of my core beliefs ever since I started thinking seriously about policy, politics and government.

When I read stories over the past few days about how Senate Republicans plan to block President Obama’s pick for the U.S. Supreme Court — before even knowing who it is — it sends me into deep orbit.

The GOP is digging in. So is the White House.

In my view, the president’s constitutional authority should override the Senate’s role in this decision.

I’ll reiterate here something I hope hasn’t been lost on those who read this blog. My belief in presidential prerogative crosses party lines. This isn’t a partisan issue with me.

In 1991, Republican President George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to the high court to replace Justice Thurgood Marshall. I stood behind the president on that pick while working for a newspaper in Beaumont. Did the president overstate Thomas’s qualifications for the court by calling the “most qualified man” he could find? Yes, he did.

But that was his call to make. George H.W. Bush was our president, who had been elected decisively in 1988. He earned the right to select someone with whom he felt comfortable. As for the allegations of sexual harassment that arose late in the confirmation process, well,Ā I didn’t buy entirely into what was being alleged.

Four years earlier, President Ronald Reagan selected Robert Bork to the court. Was he the kind of jurist I would have picked? Heavens no! But that wasn’t my call to make. It belonged to the president. The Senate saw it differently and rejected Bork’s nomination to the court — despite Bork’s well-known brilliance and knowledge of constitutional law — on grounds that he would fundamentally reshape the direction of the Constitution.

The process worked as it was intended, even though I believed then as well in the principle of presidential prerogative.

Barack Obama is equally entitled — just as any of his predecessors have been — to put someone forward to sit on the nation’s highest judicial authority. The death of conservative icon Antonin Scalia has shocked us all. The court won’t stop functioning with only eight justices.

The larger problem, though, might lie in the Senate, where Democrats are vowing revenge if Republicans follow through with their threat to block the president’s court nominee from even getting a hearing.

The Senate could shut down. Government could stop. The upper congressional chamber could become a logjam of legislation approved by the House, which cannot become law over a dispute that Senate Republicans will have started.

For what purpose? To deny the president of the “other party” a chance to fulfill his constitutional duty, to which a majority of Americans entrusted to him twice with their votes.

Republicans want to wait for the next president to take office. They are gambling that the 45th president will be one of their own. It’s a risky gamble, though, that threatens to stymie everything else that their own constituents elected them to do — which is to govern.

legal news, national news, political news

‘Lame duck’ needs finer point . . . perhaps

Lame-Duck-Congress-a

An acquaintance of mine asked an interesting question regarding President Obama’s upcoming battle over how he intends to fill a key vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court.

He wondered how one should define the term “lame duck”?

His understanding of the term meant that an officeholder became a lame duck when his or her successor in office had been determined.

Here’s how the American Heritage Dictionary defines the term: “An elected officeholder continuing in office during the period between and election and inauguration of a successor.”

My reaction was that the definition of the term has become a bit more “fluid” these days.

Senate Republicans say they don’t want Obama to fill the vacancy created by the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia because he’s a “lame duck” president. They want the next president to make the call.

I tend to have a broader view of the term “lame duck.” I suppose one could argue that any president who wins a second term becomes a lame duck the moment the election returns are finalized. The Constitution prohibits the president from running again, so the clock begins ticking on the president’s term. If that reasoning holds up, then the American Heritage dictionary definition could be interpreted as being germane.

Whatever the case, or however one defines the term, there remains an indisputable truth. The president is in office until the very moment the successor takes the oath of office.

Therefore, the president is entitled — lame duck or not — to all the perks, privileges and power that the office commands.

President Obama is entitled to appoint someone to fill the late Justice Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court. The Senate, thus, is entitled — and obligated, in my view — to consider that appointment in a timely manner and then vote on whether to approve it.

The president’s lame-duck status should not be an issue.

But it has become one, thanks to the obstructionists who are now in charge of the U.S. Senate.

 

medical news, national news, political news

House OKs another waste-of-time measure

obamacare-1

Here we go again.

The U.S. House of Representatives has approved a measure to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The House vote comes after the Senate approved the measure earlier.

Speaker Paul Ryan blustered that the measure is going to President Obama’s desk — where it faces a certain veto.

The president’s signature effortĀ is in no danger of being overturned.

Which begs the question: Why is Congress continuing to waste the public’s time and money on these efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act?

Oh, I think I know.

Republicans who control both congressional chambers want to make political hay. They want to keep hammering at a law they detest because, they say, it expands the federal government.

Well, the ACA also does something else. It provides health insurance to roughly 17 million Americans who beforehand didn’t have it. They couldn’t afford it. They were denied medical care because they couldn’t afford to pay for it. The ACA now provides insurance.

Repeal the law? Sure. And replace it with . . . what, exactly?

House members and senators will get the veto that the president promises. They’ll be unable overturn the veto because Republicans lack the two-thirds majority in both houses to do it.

So, the dance continues.

Will someone tell the band to stop playing? Please?

 

national news, political news, State news

Sen. Cruz draws outrage … from the GOP!

cruz

Ted Cruz has had this problem almost from the day he joined the U.S. Senate in January 2013.

He thinks much too highly of himself and too little of his colleagues, many of whom have much more time in the senatorial saddle than the junior RepublicanĀ from Texas.

The Senate leadership, led by Cruz’s fellow Republicans, has shot him down yet again.

And to think the leadership did so after Cruz called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar on the Senate floor earlier this year. Shocking, I tell ya! Shocking!

Cruz in trouble in Senate

He wants to shut down the government over Planned Parenthood funding. He’s griped about GOP senators being too willing to work those dreaded Democrats. He once accused former GOP Sen. Chuck Hagel of consorting with communist North Korea while Hagel was seeking to become defense secretary in the Obama administration. He once said John Kerry — a decorated Vietnam War veteran — lacked sufficient appreciation of the military; Cruz, by the way, never wore his country’s uniform.

Now the Cruz Missile is running for president of the United States and he’s running into trouble among his colleagues.

They keep pushing back on this young man’s efforts to obstruct whenever and wherever he gets the chance.

Cruz has his fans on the right and the far right. They’re with him in his efforts to shut down the government. They like his fiery rhetoric. They believe he’s capable of fixing whatever ails the nation.

A legislator, though, has to cooperate — even with those in the other party. If he fails to learn that fundamental truth about legislating — which is the making of laws — well, nothing’s going to get done.

Ted Cruz then will have nothing to show for his bombast.

 

medical news, political news

Senate fails — one more time — to repeal Obamacare

2 Comments

When, oh when, are congressional Republicans going to wake up to the fact that the Affordable Care Act is here to stay?

The U.S. Senate tried once again — and failed once again — to repeal the ACA by seeking to tie it to a transportation funding bill. The vote split on party lines, with eight senators not voting.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/obamacare-repeal-vote-fails-in-senate-120638.html?hp=l2_4

Will this failed effort mean the end of future efforts? I am not holding my breath.

As Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., noted, the Senate now has voted 55 times to end the ACA. Fifty-five votes have failed. Meanwhile, she said, 20 million Americans have health insurance who didn’t have it before.

The U.S. Supreme Court — comprising a Republican-appointed conservative majority — has upheld the ACA in two rulings, the second of which brought a suggestion from GOP senators that we ought to make court justices stand for retention, which of course would require a fundamental change in the way the founding fathers established out system of government.

So much for “strict constructionist” views of the judiciary.

No one on either side of the political aisle believes the ACA is perfect. Yes, it has some flaws. Repeal of the law, though, isn’t the answer, particularly when those who want to repeal it keep failing to produce anything approaching a suitable alternative.

So, senators, let’s end the charade. Understand and accept — finally — that the Affordable Care Act is the law. Make it better if you wish. Failing that, then live with it.

national news

Obama finds friends in GOP

Republicans have made it their mission — a lot of them, anyhow — to trash Barack Obama as some sort of wacked-out Marxist/socialist who is intent on the destruction of the country that elected him as president of the United States.

So, what does the president do? He locks arms with Republican members of Congress and decides it’s really all right to support a free-trade agreement with a dozen Asian nations — which runs counter to where the base of his Democratic Party stands, or so it appears.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/trade-bill-clears-senate-hurdle-118178.html?hp=t4_r

The GOP-led Senate has just shut down a filibuster that had stalled the fast-track legislation to get the free trade agreement approved and sent to the president’s desk.

Obama’s major allies in this deal happen to Republicans. The Senate was acting chaotically as senators scrambled between discussion groups to hammer out some kind of deal.

What’s up with that?

I happen to believe in a freer trade than what we’ve had for so long. The world is shrinking and nations or even continents no longer can shield themselves from influences of other nations and continents.

So the free trade agreement likely now will get approved. It will end up on the president’s desk. He’ll sign it.

I’m hoping to see a lot of Republican lawmakers — along with centrist/moderate Democrats — standing with the president when he puts pen to paper.

It’s a scene we haven’t witnessed too much during the Obama administration, but which used to be a regular occurrence during the past presidencies of, say, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Government works better when both parties can find common ground. So help me, it works almost all the time.

 

 

national news, political news, Uncategorized

President, Congress head for rocky stretch run

There ought to be little doubt left that President Barack Obama’s final laps at the White House are going to be full of bitter quarrels with another “co-equal branch of government,” the U.S. Congress.

It didn’t need to come to this. But it has.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/barack-obama-delaying-loretta-lynch-vote-embarrassing-gop-117081.html?hp=b1_r1

The president took particular umbrage the other day at the Senate’s inexcusable delays in confirming Loretta Lynch to become the next attorney general.

“Nobody can describe a reason for it beyond political gamesmanship in the Senate,ā€ Obama said during a news conference with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. ā€œI have to say that there are times where the dysfunction in the Senate just goes too far. This is an example of it.”

As Politico reports, part of the reason for this dysfunction appears to be that the previous Congress opted out of deciding Lynch’s nomination, preferring to hand the job over to the current Congress. I’ll admit to supporting that view, given that the 113th Congress was leaving office. I put some measure of faith in the 114th Congress being able to do right by Lynch, the president and the cause of ensuring that we have a fully functioning Justice Department.

I guess I should have known better. My bad.

The delay now has nothing to do with her qualifications, which are superlative. It has everything to do with side issues that Senate Republicans have concocted as a pretext.

And the president calls it an “embarrassment.” Do you think? I do.

And get this, also from Politico: “Lynch was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Feb. 26, so her nomination has lingered on the Senate floor for 50 days. That is longer than the previous seven attorneys general had to wait from committee approval to floor confirmation vote ā€” combined.”

No wonder the president is angry.

It’s not going to get any better, Mr. President. Bet on a rough ride until the end of your presidency.

 

national news, political news

Reid to go 'nuclear' on Lynch nomination?

1 Comment

U.S. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is a lame-duck Democrat in a body controlled by Republicans.

He’s not going back into private life without a fight. He’s picked a doozy to wage with his GOP colleagues.

Frankly, it’s a fight worth having.

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/harry-reid-says-he-can-force-vote-loretta-lynch-nomination

Reid wants to force the Senate to vote on the nomination of Loretta Lynch to be the nation’s next attorney general. She’s been waiting seemingly since The Flood to get a vote by the full Senate, but Majority Leader Mitch McConnell keeps digging in, resisting the vote for this reason and that reason — none of which has any bearing on Lynch’s qualifications for the job to which she’s been nominated by President Obama.

She is highly qualified. She has deserved a full vote since the Senate Judiciary Committee recommended her appointment.

McConnell, though, is holding her hostage to other legislation.

Reid’s role as minority leader is supposed to put him in a subordinate capacity. However, he said this week that if he gets 51 senators to sign on, he can call for a full Senate vote and circumvent the authority reserved customarily for the majority leader.

He’s going to enrage McConnell if he manages to schedule the vote. A majority of senators already has said they plan to confirm Lynch as AG. The trick, then, is to get a majority to agree simply to a vote.

Lynch would succeed Eric Holder at Justice. Republicans already detest Holder. Every day Lynch is delayed from taking her job is a day that Holder remains at his post. Why in the world, if you’re a Senate Republican, do you want to keep someone on the job that you cannot stand?

Senate protocol and decorumĀ are supposed to inviolable. A lot of it has been tossed aside in recent years as the parties have fought tooth-and-nail with each other. Democrats changed the filibuster rules in the previous Congress. And just recently, a group of Republicans sent a letter to the Iranian mullahs telling them the nuclear deal worked out could be tossed aside when the next president takes office in January 2017.

Decorum? Protocol? It’s gone, mostly.

Harry Reid’s set to play some hardball. If it gets Loretta Lynch confirmed as the next attorney general, well, let him throw the first pitch.