Disinformation On Judges
Thomas Sowell - April 26, 2005 - TownHall.com The courts are the last hope for enacting the liberal agenda because liberals cannot get enough votes to control Congress or most state legislatures. Unelected judges can cut the voters out of the loop and decree liberal dogma as the law of the land.
If you listen to the Main Stream Media they clearly believe that they have defeated the Republicans. The 200 year history of giving judges an up or down vote has been subverted first by the liberal democrats politicizing the courts to get laws passed that they cannot get the people to support. Second, in the face of losing this recent power, they are abandoning the practice of giving judges a vote.
If all you listen to is the MSM democrats appear to be winning the public relations game by LYING repeatedly that they are not changing historical practice, and FALSELY claiming that it is the Republicans who are doing this.
Will they get away with it? Do the democrats really think the American people are that stupid? Thomas Sowell frames the issue in his usual easily readable style.
War On Democracy?
No court nominee has ever been filibustered before the democrats started to filibuster the nominees of George W. Bush. This has never happened in over 200 years. Robert Byrd led democrat campaigns on several occasions to get rid of the filibuster when it was used against legislation that he favored. Now Byrd is going ballistic that the same act he favored several times, banning filibusters, is being proposed for something he disagrees with. I think we used to call that bigotry.
However legislation, the basis for Byrd's desire to change the rules, is not protected by a Constitutional provision that denies the Senate use of a filibuster. Court nominees were specifically exempted from any form of supermajority requirement when the Constitution was written. They only require the President nominate them and a majority of the Senate vote in favor. This means that a filibuster to stop them is itself un-Constitutional.
This is the background to the current attempt by democrats to claim that they will bring America's government to a halt if Republicans change the Senate rules to get rid of the un-Constitutional filibuster for court nominees. Please remember, this has never before been used for court nominees in our history until democrats started doing it in the last congress. Also please remember, the Senate rules can be legally changed by a majority of Senators. The democrats have used this process for the last two centuries. Changing rules only became the object of rage and a hate filled campaign to denounce it when the Republicans decided to do it for this purpose.
The latest pack of MSM editorials just came out, and this one from "The Nation", America's premier magazine for liberal positions is typical, calling it on their front page "A War On Democracy". It uses extreme language to denounce any Republican mentioned in the editorial and misstates the position of democrats by overlooking their threat to stop government if they lose. It also uses standard socialist demogoguery to exaggerate what the Republicans are doing, calling it "extreme".
The Nation
Legislative BOMB
Editorial - April 7, 2005 The nuclear option could take a variety of forms. Under the most likely scenario, Vice President Cheney, president of the Senate, would rule that filibusters against judicial nominees are unconstitutional. If a bare majority of the Senate upheld the move, such filibusters would for all practical purposes be eliminated, and only fifty-one votes would be needed to approve a nominee. Democrats would effectively lose their last tool for blocking Bush choices not just for the lower courts but also for the Supreme Court seats that are all but certain to open before his term ends.
Democrats have illegally used the courts to "create" legislation that they could not get citizens to support for nearly 60 years. This illegal judicial activism has become so common that democrats seem to forget, it is NOT democracy. Judges who do these things are not elected and enjoy lifetime job protection with power that the average citizen can only dream of.
Having packed the courts with liberal judicial activists who are legislating from the bench, the democrats are now claiming that to end this politicizing of the courts is an act of .... politicizing the courts. Truly bizarre logic.
