Enough! Fucking Enough: The Latest Republican Filibusters Are Nothing Short of Outrageous
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And that brings us to the Senate. I have known Mel Watt for 20 years. He is one of the smartest and finest members of Congress, an all-round good guy who has worked hard and mastered a range of issues, including housing, in his long tenure on the House Financial Services Committee, which has the housing jurisdiction. Mel Watt was nominated by President Obama to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency—and was blocked by a Republican filibuster. The rationale that Watt was not qualified for the position was flimsy at best. If individual senators wanted to vote against him, they certainly have the right to do so on any basis. But to deny the president his choice for this post, a veteran and moderate lawmaker with sterling credentials and moral character, via filibuster, is nothing short of outrageous. Only two Republicans in the Senate, Rob Portman and Richard Burr, Watt's colleague from North Carolina, voted for cloture.
Watt was not the only victim of a drive-by filibuster; so was Patricia Millett, a superbly qualified and mainstream nominee for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Only two Republicans supported cloture here; Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, and three others voted "present" (which was no help, since anything but a vote for cloture is meaningless with a rule requiring 60 votes, period, to end debate). The rationale here was even more flimsy than that used against Watt, namely that Obama is trying to "pack" the D.C. Circuit. FDR tried to "pack" the Supreme Court by adding seats to the existing Court. Barack Obama is moving to fill long-standing vacancies on the D.C. Circuit. On this Circuit, thanks to a slew of retired judges appointed by presidents long gone, conservatives have an edge that Mitch McConnell is determined to keep no matter what.
When Harry Reid and McConnell reached a deal on filibusters in January, it was clear that a key component of that deal was that Republicans in the Senate would give due deference to a newly reelected president in his executive nominations, and would only oppose judicial nominations for courts of appeals under "extraordinary circumstances," which clearly means judges without clear qualifications or experience, or extreme ideologies. No one could accuse Millett of either of those characteristics. This is all about denying a president the right to pick judges to fill existing vacancies. Two more nominees for the D.C. Circuit are coming up soon, the real test of whether Republicans will continue to flout the January agreement and threaten fundamental comity in the Senate.
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If the other two D.C. Circuit nominees are filibustered and blocked, I would support Harry Reid's move to change the rules now, to move from a 60-vote requirement to stop debate and vote to a 40-vote requirement to continue debate. The argument that if he does so, Republicans will do the same thing when they take the White House and Senate is a bad one. Can anyone doubt that McConnell would blow up the filibuster rule in a nanosecond if he had the ability to fill all courts with radical conservatives like Janice Rogers Brown for decades to come? I hope it does not come to this—and that the problem solvers in the Senate keep their titles, preserve their institution, and stop the filibuster madness.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/11/the-latest-republican-filibusters-are-nothing-short-of-outrageous/281237/
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