REPUBLICANS FINALLY UNITE ON SOMETHING …
Republicans in the United States Senate stuck together this week and invoked the so-called “nuclear option” in the battle to confirm Donald Trump’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Senate president Mitch McConnell made the motion to change the chamber’s rules on Supreme Court appointments – a.k.a. the option – which passed by a straight party-line vote of 52-48.
Even uber-liberal “Republican” Lindsey Graham voted the right way.
Miracles never cease, huh?
The change to the Senate’s rules means Trump’s nominee – Neil Gorsuch – needs support from only a simple majority of Senators to be confirmed to the bench. That vote should happen as soon as Friday.
Democrats rallied forty-five votes to filibuster Gorsuch’s nomination – even though he was unanimously confirmed by the Senate for his seat on a federal district court a few short years ago.
“This threatened filibuster cannot be allowed to succeed or to continue for the sake of the Senate, for the sake of the court and for the sake our country,” McConnell said.
In 2013 the Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate invoked the so-called “nuclear option” as a way of ramming through dozens of former U.S. president Barack Obama’s most controversial appointees to various executive and judicial branch posts.
Do we support the GOP’s move? Yes.
“Doing away with the 60-vote threshold for Supreme Court picks would level this playing field once and for all – and deal Democrats a dose of the medicine they doled out to Republicans four years ago,” we wrote back in January. “It would also force liberals who enthusiastically embraced the overbearing executive actions of the Obama administration to choose between silence and hypocrisy in their response.”
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