A moderate group of seven Republicans and seven Democrats made a deal to keep a nasty fight over judicial filibustering from spilling over into other Senate business, and the ideologues from both parties appear to be going along with it.
The deal calls for filibusters not to be used except in “extreme cases” (whatever that bland and unclear language means), and that three out of five judicial nominees will be given up or down votes on whether they get judgeships or not.
The other two are still under filibuster threat, which is widely seen as being the end of those nominations.
While this deal is a compromise and neither side is truly happy with it, it makes more sense to allow all five votes to happen; if the Democrats (or Republicans) feel that a nominee has problems, it’s their duty to convince their colleagues from BOTH sides of the aisle that they should vote ‘no’ on a particular nominee, not simply use the filibuster to prevent a vote from being taken.
As we’ve seen with the Bolton U.N. nomination, the Democrats were successful in getting several of their Republican colleagues on the Senate committee to come around to their point of view on Bolton’s treatment of subordinates. The end result was that the Bolton nomination was sent to the full Senate without the committee’s approval. That’s a group of Senators doing their J-O-B-S and presenting evidence to support their positions that convinced the opposition that the reasoning for the objections was sound.
A Senator discussing his grandmother’s recipe for apple pie for an hour on the Senate floor and then discussing the finer points of chess for an hour during a filibuster is a tremendous waste of taxpayer resources. It stops other legitimate business from being discussed and voted on. So hopefully all sides will use the filibuster sparingly and get on with important Senate business.
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