ThinkFast: May 19, 2011
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on May 20th, 2011 4:36 am by HL
President Obama is set to deliver a much-anticipated speech on U.S. aims in the Middle East at the State Department today. He is expected to announce a $2 billion aid package for Egypt and Tunisia, the two countries that have seen dictators step down this year, and administration officials say he may “formally endorse Israel’s pre-1967 borders as the starting point for negotiations over a Palestinian state”–a clear signal he expects concessions from Israel.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is leaving the House GOP budget plan “twisting in the wind” by “not whipping his GOP colleagues on the vote.” “Republican senators say McConnell has made it clear he will vote for the House Budget Committee chairman’s plan, but has said rank-and-file members should vote as they want on the 2012 budget proposal.”
The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank writes today that “default denier” politicians who think a default on the debt would not cause economic peril are like those who deny global warming or who think the moon landing was a hoax. Milbank also asked Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) if he would ever increase taxes to reduce the deficit, and the senator said he’s not “interested” in raising taxes.
Embattled I.M.F. Chief Dominique Strauss Kahn resigned yesterday, four days after he was arrested on charges that he sexually assaulted a maid in a Manhattan hotel room. In his statement, Strauss Kahn vigorously denied the rape allegations and said he was stepping down to focus on his defense. The resignation will spur the search for his successor.
Richard Painter, a former lawyer in the Bush White House, argues that the GOP should give Obama judicial nominee Goodwin Liu an up-or-down vote. “He’s an excellent choice, and should be confirmed,” Painter said of Liu. “Most important, the seat should not remain vacant because the Senate refuses to fulfill its constitutional mandate and vote on this.” Read more on the Liu nomination here.
“U.S. officials have ‘no evidence’ that current Pakistani leaders knew Osama bin Laden” was hiding near their capital city,” with Defense Secretary Robert Gates saying he had seen “no evidence at all that the senior leadership knew.” Still, they suspect a retired official knew about or aided Bin Laden.
A suicide of Guantanamo Bay detainee Wednesday marks the 8th death at the prison camp. The detainee who committed suicide was an Afghan known as Inayatullah, who while being an admitted Al Qaeda member never had any charges filed against him.
And finally: President Obama’s reelection campaign is selling T-shirts and mugs touting that Obama was “made in America,” and featuring the president’s long-form birth certificate on its back. Joking about the birther conspiracy, ABC News’ Jake Tapper Tweeted about the shirts, “Obama campaign refuses to release long-sleeve birth certificate shirt.”
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The Senate just voted by a 52-43 majority to end the GOP’s filibuster of Professor Goodwin Liu’s nomination to a federal appeal court — which, in the bizarro world that is the U.S. Senate, means that Liu’s nomination will not move forward. The vote was entirely along party lines, except that Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) voted “yea” and Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) voted “nay.”
Just six short years ago, Republicans sang a very different tune when it came to judicial filibusters. Senate Republicans almost unanimously declared filibusters of judicial nominees to be a horrific betrayal of their constitutional role. Many Republicans outright declared judicial filibusters to be unconstitutional. Here is a representative sample of how current GOP senators felt about such filibusters when a Republican was in the White House:
- Lamar Alexander (R-TN): “I would never filibuster any President’s judicial nominee, period. I might vote against them, but I will always see they came to a vote.”
- Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) and Johnny Isakson (R-GA): “Every judge nominated by this president or any president deserves an up-or-down vote. It’s the responsibility of the Senate. The Constitution requires it.”
- Tom Coburn (R-OK): “If you look at the Constitution, it says the president is to nominate these people, and the Senate is to advise and consent. That means you got to have a vote if they come out of committee. And that happened for 200 years.”
- John Cornyn (R-TX): “We have a Democratic leader defeated, in part, as I said, because I believe he was identified with this obstructionist practice, this unconstitutional use of the filibuster to deny the president his judicial nominations.
- Mike Crapo (R-ID): “Until this Congress, not one of the President’s nominees has been successfully filibustered in the Senate of the United States because of the understanding of the fact that the Constitution gives the President the right to a vote.”
- Chuck Grassley (R-IA): “It would be a real constitutional crisis if we up the confirmation of judges from 51 to 60, and that’s essentially what we’d be doing if the Democrats were going to filibuster.”
- Mitch McConnell (R-KY): “The Constitution of the United States is at stake. Article II, Section 2 clearly provides that the President, and the President alone, nominates judges. The Senate is empowered to give advice and consent. But my Democratic colleagues want to change the rules. They want to reinterpret the Constitution to require a supermajority for confirmation.”
Sadly, this willingness to declare something unconstitutional when it suits them and then pretend the Constitution says something else entirely when the political winds change is par for the GOP’s course. Republicans invented a previously unheard of constitutional objection to the Affordable Care Act, they’ve called everything from Social Security to Medicare to child labor laws unconstitutional, and they’ve even pretended that the Constitution allows them to strip Americans of their citizenship.
Sen. Nelson’s vote against Liu, however, is utterly inexplicable. When Bush was naming judges, Nelson voted to end cloture on Judge Janice Rogers Brown, a radical tenther who once compared liberalism to “slavery” and Social Security to a “socialist revolution.” It is impossible to imagine what standard Nelson applied that would keep a mainstream voice like Liu off the court, but allow Judge Brown to shape the law.
