Quit Your Whining, Democrats

My View by Jim Yacavone

You have probably read about the angry howls of protest from Senate Democrats over the Republicans’ vow not to vote on Obama’s Supreme Court nominee until after the Presidential election. On a quiet night you can even hear them here in Fannin County. Maybe those are coyotes—I’m not sure.


This gnashing and wailing from the Democrats is just another example of the two-faced hypocrisy we have come to expect from Washington politicians. And yes, it can come from both sides of the aisle.

Obama and the Democrats are now arguing that the Republicans have a constitutional duty to have a floor vote on whether Merrick Garland should be the new Supreme Court justice. That’s not true. The Constitution does not say the Senate has to vote on the nominee. It says that the President’s judicial nominations require the “consent” of the Senate to become judges.

Like it or not, one way for the Senate majority party to withhold its consent to nominations or proposed laws is to let them die in committee. That means they never reach the Senate floor for a vote. This is done all the time in the Senate. In the last five full sessions of the Senate, 17,663 bills were introduced but only 12 percent of them made it to a floor vote and passed, and many those bills were simply ceremonial. These numbers include Senates controlled by the Democrats.

That’s just the way the institution works. It worked that way for the benefit of the Democrats when they were the majority, and it’s working for the benefit of the Republicans now that they are majority. You’ve heard of crocodile tears. Well, this is crocodile anger on the part of the Dems.

Some Democrats argue that the founding fathers intended for the Senate to have an up or down floor vote on Presidential nominations rather than let them die in committee. It’s deliciously ironic that the Democrats now resort to a strict constructionist, “intent of the founders” argument for interpreting the Constitution when their nominees who have made it to the Supreme Court show no such constraint when they interpret the Constitution.

It’s also offensively hypocritical for the Democrats to take such a position when they have espoused and done the exact opposite in the past.

In the last year of Bush’s term, then Senator Joe Biden said that Bush “should consider following the practice of the majority of his predecessors and not name a nominee until after the November election is completed.” Just to make certain that he was not misunderstood, Biden went on: “The senate … must consider how it would respond to a Supreme Court vacancy that would occur in the full throes of an election year. It is my view that if the president … presses an election year nomination, the Senate Judiciary Committee should seriously consider not scheduling confirmation hearings on the nomination after the political campaign season is over.”

And talk about hypocrites—Senators Obama, Clinton, Reid, Kerry, Schumer and Reid supported a Senate filibuster to prevent Bush’s Supreme Court nominee, Samuel Alito, from receiving a floor vote in the Senate.

When Bush was president the Democrat controlled Senate blocked many of his nominees for federal judgeships by never giving them hearings or committee votes. In the very next congress, when the Republicans were in the majority, the Democrats obstructed the process by filibustering Bush’s judicial nominations.

So I say to the Democrats, quit your whining. What goes around, comes around.

That’s my view. What’s yours?