Senate Democrats are placating the party’s core liberal activists dispirited by the troubled rollout of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul and government snooping.
The move comes ahead of next year’s midterm elections when a president’s party typically loses seats in Congress.
Democrats voted unilaterally to change the Senate’s filibuster practices and take away the minority party’s ability to block presidential nominees for key appellate judgeships and top federal agency posts with just 40 or 41 votes.
Republicans insist that the move engineered by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid won’t matter in next year’s congressional races as the political fallout over Obama’s health care law registers with voters.
(AP)
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4 Responses
But by having discarded a long standing agreement, they opened the way for the Republicans to pack the courts with new judgeships, and to amend the Rules of Decision act to drop Stare Decisis, and review the last 65 years of left wing jurisprudence. All it requires is for the Republicans not to shoot themselves in the foot between now and 2016, and on Jan. 21, 2017 we’ll really have change that WE can believe in.
Akuperma,
what stop the Democrats from repealing a law that they made right before they leave office?
The Republicans will never get the chance to use this to promote any agenda that the liberals don’t want.
Either they will never get the power, or they will be intimidated by the lib media into not using it as usual; Or
if they look like they might gain power along with the will to use it, the Democrats will simply change the law back again to take it away from the Republicans.
The Democrats declared open partisan warfare. They also serious raised the stakes since if one party gets control of the White House and 50 seats in the Senate (with the Vice-President to break ties) they can do almost anything and do it immediately. In the past, one needed 60 Senators (withthe Vice-President being irrelevant) to pass major legislation. It’s a new world. It means that very extreme and radical legislation will now be on the agenda, for good or ill. It might also force the Republican idealogues to think twice in undermining moderate Republicans since the stakes are much higher.