Obama just committed an unprecedented tyranny.
This represents a ridiculous power grab from one of the most tyrannical administrations in US History.
Let me ask you a question:
If the party in power in both the presidency and the Senate should not have the right to appoint and approve judges,
who should?
Please be specific and explain your reasoning in detail.
Good question.
Why the blocks when it was Bush and the Republicans trying to fill seats?
well that was 'then' this is now
The hypocrisy here should not go unnoticed. Although the filibuster for legislation has a long history, prior to 2003 it was seldom used to block executive-branch nominations — and appellate-court nominees in particular. In fact, Democrats themselves began using it this way in the 108th Congress, after they lost the Senate in the 2002 midterm elections. Here’s the backstory.
Start with Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court’s December 2000 decision that effectively decided the presidential outcome, creating a firestorm among Democrats, especially among the legal professoriate. On January 13, 2001, for example, 554 professors from 120 law schools took out a full-page ad in the New York Times condemning the Court’s majority for having acted not as judges but as “political proponents for candidate Bush.” And at a Democratic retreat a month later Yale’s Bruce Ackerman urged members not to confirm a single Bush nominee for the Supreme Court until after the 2004 elections.
Democrats got their break in May when Vermont senator James Jeffords left the Republican party. That switched control of the Senate to the Democrats, who immediately turned their attention to the eleven appellate court nominees then before the Senate Judiciary Committee, two of them Democrats — a gesture from Bush. Those two were immediately confirmed. The rest would not even get hearings. Instead, Democrats began calling for “litmus tests” — explicit demands that nominees state their views on everything from abortion to affirmative action to Congress’s unquestioned power to regulate anything and everything.
But the near lock-down on appellate-court nominations did not end with the 2002 midterm elections, which switched control of the Senate back to the Republicans. It was then that Senate Democrats began the unprecedented filibustering of appellate-court nominations. The most egregious case was that of Miguel Estrada, whose life story was pure American dream. First nominated by President Bush in May 2001, Estrada finally withdrew his name from further consideration some 27 months later, after seven failed cloture votes in the next, 108th Congress.
Things came to a head early in the 109th Congress when Republicans themselves, still in control of the Senate, threatened finally to “go nuclear” — to end the appellate-court filibusters Democrats had introduced only in the previous Congress. That was headed off when the bipartisan “Gang of 14” reached a compromise: Democrats would filibuster nominees only in “extraordinary circumstances,” they agreed, and Republicans would not use the nuclear option. That compromise held for the rest of the 109th Congress — though not without difficulties — but it became moot after Democrats regained control of the Senate following the 2006 midterm elections since they no longer needed to filibuster Bush nominees.
In sum, after the 2000 election was decided, Senate Democrats sat on their hands for two years as Bush appellate-court nominees twisted in the wind. In the minority after the 2002 elections, those Democrats then initiated the filibuster for many of BushÂ’s nominees. Only after the 2005 Gang of 14 compromise was imposed did things settle down. And after the 2006 elections, Democrats no longer needed to filibuster.
more at-
Filibuster Reaction: Harry Reid?s nuclear hypocrisy