The bodies on the fainting couches are stacked three deep over at the Washington Post this morning.

[markpkessinger]

46. My comment on Millbank's column

Here is the text of a comment I posted in response to Millbank's column in the Post:

Spare us the pearl clutching, Mr. Millbank.

To defend the filibuster as the GOP has been using it requires one to believe that the framers of the Constitution intended to permit a procedural rule of one legislative chamber, employed by a minority faction within that chamber to prevent the full body of the Senate from exercising its Constitutional role of advise and consent with respect to executive branch nominations, and thereby also effectively giving a minority faction in one chamber of the legislature the ability prevent a president from exercising his or her Constitutionally-appointed power of appointment. That is so utterly illogical as to be absurd. If it were a matter of the minority having principled objections to the nominees in quewstion, then your argument might hold water. But the fact is Republicans have been abusing the filibuster since this President took office, using it not merely in cases where they have a principled objection to a particular nominee, but to actually deny a sitting President the power of appointments provided to his office by the Constitution. They even used it to try to impede the functioning of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, by refusing to permit a vote on ANY nominee at all to head that agency. The GOP's employment of the filibuster has been an egregious abuse of the rule.

I remind you that the Constitution does not contemplate the existence of political parties, so any suggestion that there is, or should be, any requirement whatsoever to "win votes" from the minority party is sheer nonsense. The "two centuries of custom" to which you refer was already irrpeparably broken, and the constant use of it by the GOP for specious reasons had transformed it into something that bore little resemblance to the filibuster as understood 200 years ago.