By Fester: Michelle Malkin is engaging on the filibuster question and she seems to be in basic agreement with BJ’s argument that there is a place for a counter-majoritarian tool. However when she expands her thought process, I am confused……

A president should have the presumption of choosing his own Cabinet and advisors as well as judges.

Sorry, Ed, gotta disagree with you there. The Constitution specifically grants the Senate the power right of consent on both executive and judicial appointments. The filibuster is a tool that the minority party can use to withhold consent on bad appointments just as validly as it can use it to block legislation.

I agree that the President should (and does) have the option to choose his appointmentees, but the Senate also has the right to say no. Under the current rules that includes the option of filibustering.

Presidential appointments, to the judiciary or the federal bureaucracy, are a different matter. Having participated in the “nuclear option” debate in 2005, I still think that a filibuster on presidential appointments is inappropriate and should be discarded. A president should have the presumption of choosing his own Cabinet and advisors as well as judges. Elections have consequences, and as Republicans and Democrats point out in every campaign, that’s one of the biggest.

If you allow the Democrats to do it during the Bush administration without responding in kind, then you have effectively allowed them to block every Republican nominee while getting all their own approved.

I’m sorry, but precedent has been set, like it or not. The only way to allow the filibuster to end for nominees is by setting a sunset date by mutual consent between Republicans and Democrats, after allowing Republicans to use it during the Obama administration.

And that would require the Democrats publicly admitting they were wrong to use the filibuster that way, and allowing it to be used against them by way of retribution until the sunset date arrives.

And do you really think the Democrats would honor such an agreement once they have political power?

Sometimes, you just have to deal with the consequences of others’ wrong actions, even when you’d prefer not to.

ThereGoesTheNeighborhood on February 17, 2009 at 11:35 PM

Commenting on my own comments. Must have caught it from The Race Card.

But just a follow-up to the above: if the Senate had done the nuclear option for getting rid of the filibuster on judicial appointments, then all the above would be moot. By allowing the Democrats to get away with the filibuster for nominees, they essentially perpetuated it as a legitimate tactic. If it had been stamped out immediately, then we would have seen Bush’s nominees seated, and it wouldn’t be so critical to prevent Obama from seating his own nominees. By conceding defeat, we now have to fight back twice as hard.

Presidential appointments, to the judiciary or the federal bureaucracy, are a different matter. Having participated in the “nuclear option” debate in 2005, I still think that a filibuster on presidential appointments is inappropriate and should be discarded. A president should have the presumption of choosing his own Cabinet and advisors as well as judges. Elections have consequences, and as Republicans and Democrats point out in every campaign, that’s one of the biggest.

If you allow the Democrats to do it during the Bush administration without responding in kind, then you have effectively allowed them to block every Republican nominee while getting all their own approved.

I’m sorry, but precedent has been set, like it or not. The only way to allow the filibuster to end for nominees is by setting a sunset date by mutual consent between Republicans and Democrats, after allowing Republicans to use it during the Obama administration.

And that would require the Democrats publicly admitting they were wrong to use the filibuster that way, and allowing it to be used against them by way of retribution until the sunset date arrives.

And do you really think the Democrats would honor such an agreement once they have political power?

Sometimes, you just have to deal with the consequences of others’ wrong actions, even when you’d prefer not to.

Not good. I don’t think I can take 4 years of this and after the campaign witht the media bias… is there ever going to be a calm political climate in the USA again? I feel like I am on pins and needles having to watch this corrupt President and Congress for fear of seeing 200+ years of America slip away.

…Pelosi just wanted absolute control of legislation. That’s what the filibuster prevents,..

The House does not have filibusters. It is only in the Senate.

You’ll notice that the left can completely reverse its positions on philosophic questions at the drop of a hat, but anything that gets down to how much power *they* should have is a constant.

We’ve already seen the left arguing that “dissent” within the public sphere from the Obama agenda is unpatriotic after years of hearing that dissent is the highest form of patriotism. And the Obama agenda of giving away a trillion dollars to special interests goes against everything the left has claimed to be opposed to these last few years.

Expect to see much, much more of this. And the media will continue to act as Obama’s media organ through it all…just watch.

I have no problems with fillibusters but make them legit and not procedural.

Agreed. Make them stand up and speak – hour after hour, through the night, for days on end if necessary. In the case of the porkulus bill, there would be plenty of script.

The “procedural” filibuster is for wimps.

I only object to the procedural filibuster. If you want to filibuster, you ought to be out on the floor debating the bill, until all considerations have been brought out, and voted on.

Heck, they could have filibustered the spendathon by reading the bill, front to back, with call outs to what legislation was being effected.

That would have been noticed.

Keith_Indy on February 17, 2009 at 4:06 PM

I was thinking the same thing…

Having participated in the “nuclear option” debate in 2005, I still think that a filibuster on presidential appointments is inappropriate and should be discarded.

Agreed.

The party of Hope and Change has been unmasked as the party of Fear and Corruption….

DL13 on February 17, 2009 at 4:00 PM

The Axis of Evil now presides in our Nation’s Captitol. These Evil Doers have their WMD’s pointed straight at the GOP and will not stop until they obtain complete dictatorship. Well, until they begin to eat their own, whichever comes first.

It’s a Senate rule BTW, subject to just a majority vote.

it was a bad idea when the GOP proposed it and it is a bad idea now.

DeathToMediaHacks on February 17, 2009 at 3:40 PM

As I recall, the Republicans wanted to limit the filibuster to what it was originally designed to do…stop legislation from being shoved down our throats by the majority. The filibuster wasn’t meant to be used to block appointments to the bench. Nominees are to be given a straight up or down vote and the majority carries the day. DemocRATs used the filibuster to change the appointment rules to be a super-majority for confirmation. You might be able to get 51 votes for an appointee but you can’t bust the filibuster without 60 votes…so they changed the rules. Not nice. That’s what the nuclear option was all about. Enforcing the rules as they were originally meant to be. Unfortunately, clowns like McCain and the “gang of 14″ neutered the Republican majority.

Nah, we no longer have two parties in this country, just one who exploits us in our face, and one which does it in different ways. We’re milked by the charlatans/quacks from both sides. We are the fools.

Entelechy on February 17, 2009 at 3:55 PM

This.

And this (via The Other McCain):

Whatever else they may be, Republicans have not been conservative since long before “W” ballooned the deficit up to its currently gargantuan proportions. With all due respect to ‘The Gipper’ (who also ballooned the deficit), the Republican party hasn’t seen a real conservative since Senator Robert Taft was defeated in the presidential primary by Dwight Eisenhower.

Having the presidency and control of both houses is like hiring starving foxes to guard the hen house.

duff65 on February 17, 2009 at 3:54 PM

I like this. Very Huckabee-esque

Heck, they could have filibustered the spendathon by reading the bill, front to back, with call outs to what legislation was being effected.

That would have been noticed.