Senate Democrats want more info from Trumps Cabinet picks
Source: Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — The top Democrats on Senate committees responsible for vetting President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees said Thursday his picks should not advance to a Senate vote without completing a financial disclosure form and responding to “reasonable requests for additional information.”
The statement comes after preliminary contacts with several nominees have failed to satisfy Democrats’ expectations for information such as tax returns and other disclosures regarding financial holdings. Several of Trump’s nominees are billionaires whose holding could raise conflicts of interest.
“The United States Senate has a rich, bipartisan tradition of vetting nominees to the president’s Cabinet,” the Democrats wrote in the statement, which was released by Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, the incoming Democratic leader. “We hope to continue that tradition.”
Democrats have limited options to block nominees outright because they changed filibuster rules when controlling the Senate in 2013. But they could force longer debates than usual at the start of an administration, when many nominees have traditionally been confirmed on voice votes.
Read more: http://www.salon.com/2016/12/22/senate-democrats-want-more-info-from-trumps-cabinet-picks/
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in some cases, down to Regional Director level, who few would blink at and who would normally be confirmed by unanimous consent.
This particular push by Reid was to mainly get the damn District and Circuit judges confirmed - notably to fill the D.C. Court of Appeals -
The last straw came when Republicans announced their intention to filibuster all of Obama's nominees to the DC circuit court simply because they didn't want a Democratic president to be able to fill any more vacancies. At that point, even moderate Democrats had finally had enough. For all practical purposes, Republicans had declared war on Obama's very legitimacy as president, forbidding him from carrying out a core constitutional duty. Begging and pleading and cutting deals was no longer on the table. Eliminating the filibuster for judicial and executive branch nominees was the only option left, and on Thursday that's what Democrats finally did.
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http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/11/charts-explain-why-democrats-went-nuclear-filibuster
The Obama Brief
The President considers his judicial legacy.
By Jeffrey Toobin
[font size="1"]The majority of Obama’s appointments have been women and nonwhite males.
Illustration by Barry Blitt[/font]
In July, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued a ruling that threatened the future of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. By a vote of two to one, the court held, in Halbig v. Burwell, that the insurance subsidies that allow millions of Americans to buy health insurance were contrary to the text of the law and thus were illegal. If such a decision had been made earlier in Obama’s tenure, lawyers for his Administration would have been left with a single, risky option: an appeal to the politically polarized, and usually conservative, Supreme Court.
This year, the lawyers had another choice. When President Obama took office, the full D.C. Circuit had six judges appointed by Republican Presidents, three named by Democrats, and two vacancies. By the time of the Halbig decision, [font color="red"]Obama had placed four judges on the D.C. court, which shifted its composition to seven Democratic appointees and four Republicans.[/font] In light of this realignment, the Obama Administration asked the full D.C. Circuit to vacate the panel’s decision and rehear the Halbig case en banc—that is, with all the court’s active judges participating. The full court promptly agreed with the request, and the decision that would have crippled Obamacare is no longer on the books. Oral argument before the full court is now set for December.
The transformation of the D.C. Circuit has been replicated in federal courts around the country. Obama has had two hundred and eighty judges confirmed, which represents about a third of the federal judiciary. Two of his choices, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, were nominated to the Supreme Court; fifty-three were named to the circuit courts of appeals, two hundred and twenty-three to the district courts, and two to the Court of International Trade. When Obama took office, Republican appointees controlled ten of the thirteen circuit courts of appeals; [font color="red"]Democratic appointees now constitute a majority in nine circuits.[/font] Because federal judges have life tenure, nearly all of Obama’s judges will continue serving well after he leaves office.
Obama’s judicial nominees look different from their predecessors. In an interview in the Oval Office, the President told me, “I think there are some particular groups that historically have been underrepresented—like Latinos and Asian-Americans—that represent a larger and larger portion of the population. And so for them to be able to see folks in robes that look like them is going to be important. When I came into office, I think there was one openly gay judge who had been appointed. We’ve appointed ten.”
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http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/27/obama-brief
DU continues to be infested with amnesiacs who seem to forget how fucking obnoxious the GOP had become. THIS was part of the fucking "long game" - getting control of the courts.
