Neil Gorsuch-- Enemy Of The People... Literally

Even my twitter polls don't usually result in such unanimity. But let's not kind ourselves, Donald Trump isn't fit to appoint a justice to the Supreme Court. I almost feel sorry for Gorsuch. Almost. But not quite... because I don't feel sorry for corporate whores who seek to make the lives of ordinary American families worse. And that, after all, is exactly what Neil Gorsuch is.

Yesterday, the country was more focused on the drama of the House Intelligence Committee questioning FBI Director Comey and the fireworks that ensued, but yesterday was also the first day of hearings into the suitability of Gorsuch to be confirmed for a lifetime appointment by Donald Trump to the Supreme Court.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley began the hearings by laying out a schedule that would have the committee vote on the nomination in two weeks. Democrats, still fuming that the Senate Republicans refused to even consider the nomination of Merrick Garland, see no reasons to rubber-stamp this controversial nomination the way extremists like Ted Cruz is demanding that they do.

Jeff Merkley (D-OR), the first senator to endorse Bernie Sanders, was also first Senator to stand up and commit to opposing Gorsuch, explaining that "the Republicans stole this seat, which they clearly did. Merkley said he is still eager to hear Gorsuch answer some tough questions:

• Trump promised to nominate someone who opposed abortion. Would you overturn Roe v. Wade?
• Is money speech? Can Congress regulate campaign fundraising at all?
• Do Americans have a right to health care? What about clean air and water? Or education?
• Do people have a right to equal protection under our law and protection from discrimination, including visitors like immigrants, Muslims, and LGBT Americans?

The most compelling line of questioning yesterday came from former Rhode Island Attorney General, Sheldon Whitehouse, whose case against Gorsuch is essentially that "a conservative court," as Matt Stoller put it, "a corrupt cog in a political machine." In it's report on the hearings, the NY Times writers were struck with Whitehouse's "blistering attack on the United States Supreme Court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., listing more than a dozen decisions in which the court had voted 5 to 4 to limit voting rights, increase the role of money in politics and favor business interests. In each, he said, the five Republican appointees were in the majority. It is true the Roberts court has been closely divided along partisan lines. Several studies have also showed that the Roberts court tends to favor business interests. If Judge Gorsuch fills the seat left vacant by Justice Scalia’s death last year, he will return the court to a familiar dynamic, with a five-member majority of conservative justices, all appointed by Republican presidents, and a four-member bloc of liberal justices, all appointed by Democratic presidents."

Gorsuch looks normal, both physically and on paper, qualified even. But he's a monster in normal people clothing, who has a destructive agenda. Would Trump-- I mean Bannon and Pence, of course-- have picked him under any other circumstance? Overturning Roe v Wade, dragging LGBT equality back into the 1950s and pushing Bannon's (and Mercer's) favorite project forward: deconstructed the administrative state, i.e., an agenda for the law of the jungle with no EPA, no FEC, no FCC, no CFPB, no effective regulatory agencies of any kind. Anyone voting in committee to move Gorsuch's nomination towards a vote will be embracing exactly that. Matt Stoller was awed by how forthright in his critique Whitehouse was yesterday. "There’s been a lot of bullshit peddled by the press and by insiders," he wrote, "that Neil Gorsuch can’t be beaten, that Democrats don’t have a message. He’s just so qualified, say the American Bar Association, Obama hack Neil Katyal and [Gorsuch's] former clerks. Essentially this is all coming from BigLaw firms. BigLaw firms--  both on the Democratic and Republican sides--  love a court that rules for their big business clients. He’s so qualified, they argue. Gorsuch is polite, rarely late, and has many leather bound books."

Well Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, in his opening statement at the Gorsuch nominating hearings, isn’t having it. Gorsuch, he said, will fight for big corporations versus actual ‘humans’ in every arena possible.

Whitehouse eviscerated Gorsuch as a payoff to a big conservative political machine. The special interests who financed the campaign to put Gorsuch on the court, he said, “obviously think that you will be worth their money”. Beyond that, he points out, John Roberts sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee and lied that he would just be an unbiased umpire calling balls and strikes. Roberts then went on the court and ruled for big business in every case that came before the court which involved big business. “Once burned, twice shy,” said Whitehouse. Gorsuch will join a court that ruled for big business in everything from class actions to labor to jury systems to voting rights. Whitehouse listed a litany of cases and their impacts, with this one as a particular kicker, “Help insulate investment bankers against fraud claims? Why not?”

The special interests that financed this big business takeover of the court is not principled, said Whitehouse, it isn’t intellectual, it is simply a “delivery service” for big business. Gorsuch is highly qualified, Whitehouse noted. But fundamentally Gorsuch is a payoff to the special interest groups that will profit from his rulings.

It’s important to note here that Whitehouse is making a broader claim about the court. His point isn’t just that Gorsuch should be rejected, but that Democrats should have no respect for the legitimacy of the court so long as the court serves a role as a cog in a corrupt big business machine. He’s pointing to a long-term strategy, regardless of whether Gorsuch wins. The Democrats are going to try and strip the court of the powers that it no longer deserves, because the routine bad faith big business friendly rulings that eviscerate our democratic traditions. The court itself has set itself up for this through decades of malevolent ruling to help big business. The American public is losing faith in its rulings, and that faith is in reality the only real power the court has. Most elite lawyers won’t say this, because they don’t want to anger the establishment they depend on for social, political, and financial currency. But they all know it.

Whitehouse is a very smart lawyer. It is a BIG deal to have an elite credentialed legal thinker like Whitehouse saying what we all know, which is that the Supreme Court is at this point an entirely political and anti-democratic chokepoint meant to sustain Republican and big business dominance of American culture.

Now that’s a populist message.

Will The Democrats Give The GOP Any Payback For Merrick Garland? Meet Joe Donnelly

I’ve never been very enthusiastic about Obama’s final Supreme Court pick, Merrick Garland, but he was the president and he’s the one who gets to pick Supreme Court nominees, not me. And not the opposition party. But the opposition party figured out how to do it— and it looks like they’ll get away with it— basically because Chuck Schumer shoved unelectable Senate candidates down Democratic voters’ throats, particularly Patrick Murphy (FL), Katie McGinty (PA), Ted Strickland (OH), Patty Judge (IA) and Ann Kirkpatrick (AZ). Despite polling showing that Joe Sestak would have won the Pennsylvania Senate race against Toomey, we’ll never really know for sure if democracy would have given the Democrats a Senate majority. But we do know that Schumer’s authoritarian approach backfired and guaranteed— against all odds— a Senate majority for the GOP.

On Christmas Eve the NYTimes editorial board decided, for the record, to remind their readers about the stolen Supreme Court seat:

Soon after his inauguration next month, President-elect Donald Trump will nominate someone to the Supreme Court, which has been hamstrung by a vacancy since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February. There will be public debates about the nominee’s credentials, past record, judicial philosophy and temperament. There will be Senate hearings and a vote.

No matter how it plays out, Americans must remember one thing above all: The person who gets confirmed will sit in a stolen seat.

It was stolen from Barack Obama, a twice-elected president who fulfilled his constitutional duty more than nine months ago by nominating Merrick Garland, a highly qualified and widely respected federal appellate judge.

It was stolen by top Senate Republicans, who broke with longstanding tradition and refused to consider any nominee Mr. Obama might send them, because they wanted to preserve the court’s conservative majority. The main perpetrators of the theft were Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, and Charles Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee. But virtually all Republican senators were accomplices; only two supported holding hearings.

The Republican party line — that it was an election year, so the American people should have a “voice” in the selection of the next justice — was a patent lie. The people spoke when they re-elected Mr. Obama in 2012, entrusting him to choose new members for the court. And the Senate has had no problem considering, and usually confirming, election-year nominees in the past.

Of course, Supreme Court appointments have always been political, and the court’s ideological center has shifted back and forth over time. But the Senate has given nominees full consideration and a vote even when the party in power has opposed a president’s choice. That is, until this year, when Republicans claimed that though the Constitution calls for the Senate’s “advice and consent,” senators aren’t obligated to do anything. This is a bad-faith reading of that clause, even if there is no clear way to force a vote. It certainly obliterates a well-established political norm that makes a functioning judicial branch possible. As Paul Krugman wrote in his column on Monday, institutions are not magically self-sustaining, and they “don’t protect against tyranny when powerful people start defying political norms.”

This particular norm is of paramount importance because the court’s institutional legitimacy depends on its perceived separation from the elected branches — a fragile concept in the best of times. By tying the latest appointment directly to the outcome of the election, Mr. McConnell and his allies took a torch to that idea — an outrageous gambit that, to nearly everyone’s shock, has paid off. But while Republicans may be celebrating now, the damage they have inflicted on the confirmation process, and on the court as an institution, may be irreversible.

The slope is both slippery and steep. If Republicans could justify an election-year blockade, what’s to stop Democrats in the future from doing the same? For that matter, why should the party controlling the Senate ever allow a president of the opposing party to choose a justice? Indeed, in the weeks before the election, Senate Republicans were threatening, with the encouragement of leading conservative thinkers, never to confirm anyone to fill the vacancy if Hillary Clinton won.

Can anything be done to repair the harm? One step — as obvious as it is unlikely — would be for Mr. Trump to renominate Mr. Garland. Conservatives will scoff, but they know he is as qualified for the job as anyone in the country. When Mr. Garland was floated as a possible choice for the Supreme Court in 2010, Orrin Hatch, the senior Republican senator from Utah, called him a “consensus nominee” and said there was “no question” that he would be confirmed with bipartisan support. That’s partly why Mr. Obama nominated him this time, and also why Mr. McConnell denied him a hearing — he knew he couldn’t prevent a Senate vote once Americans saw an eminently qualified and reasonable jurist testify on live TV.

At the very least, Mr. Trump could follow President Obama’s example and pick a centrist — someone who commands wide respect and operates within the bounds of mainstream legal thought. That would be an appropriate gesture from a man who lost the popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes and will enter office with the lowest approval ratings in recent history.

The shameful, infuriating actions of the Senate Republicans won’t be ignored in the history books. In a desperate effort to keep a conservative majority on the court, they rejected their own professed values of preserving American institutions. There’s little hope that they will come to their senses now, but they and Mr. Trump have the power, and the obligation, to fix the mess they created.

I want to answer a question the Times editors posed. They asked “what’s to stop Democrats… from doing the same,” blockading whichever nominee— sure to be less qualified and less of a consensus type candidate than Garland— Trump pukes up?

A couple of weeks ago NPR’s Audie Cornish interviewed one of the embodiments of the reason why the Democrats won’t be blockading anything: Blue Dog Joe Donnelly, a bright-of-center political coward from Indiana who is an accidental senator from a red state up for his first reelection test in 2018.

Donnelly was a putrid House member and knew he was about too be defeated in 2012. He had one of the worst voting records of any Democrat in the House and there was no real enthusiasm for him in his district, which had, in any case, been gerrymandered by the Republican legislature specifically to defeat him. Inn 2010, Jackie Walorski had nearly defeated him. He managed two squeak by with a 2,500 vote win (48.2-46.8%) win, having spent $1,983,118 to Walorski’s $1,316,805. The stop was ready to outspend him by whatever it took in 2012. But instead of marching to his doom, he threw the ultimate Hail Mary pass— and won. Well, he didn’t so much as win as luck out with a crackpot GOP nominee, tea bagger Richard Mourdock, who had managed to defeat Richard Lugar in the Republican primary. Mourdock proven to be as unhinged as Donnelly needed him to be— and as the GOP Establishment feared he would be. Mourdock blundered from one crazy, outrageous statement to another and Donnelly shocked everyone by winning the Senate seat 1,281,181 (50.04%) to 1,133,621 (44.28%). A Libertarian taking 145,282 votes (5.67%).

Donnelly is a pro-NRA, anti-Choice, anti-LGBT, anti-immigrant throwback. When Cornish pressed him on his conservative voting record, Donnelly responded “I'm a proud Blue Dog, absolutely.” You tell me, does this guy sound like he’s going to stand firm against Trump’s nominees right before his reelection campaign kicks in?

CORNISH: Now, Republicans, particularly Republicans in the Senate, decided early on to essentially stand fast against President Obama. And that worked pretty well for them. Should Democrats become the party of no during a Trump administration?

DONNELLY: Well that seems pretty un-American to me - what they did. My job isn't to represent the Democrat Party or the Republican Party. It's to represent Hoosier families. I thought that was shameful behavior. And my job is to do what's right. And that's what I'm going to try and do.

CORNISH: You talked about Hoosier families. But Trump won your state by nearly 20 percent. So does it sound like they agree with his agenda? And what does that leave for you, as a Democrat in the Senate?

DONNELLY: Well, I think that the people in our state want to see more jobs, more opportunity. And they want to make sure that Washington listens to them. Look, I have an agricultural community that's second to none in the world. And every time they tried to move forward, it seemed the EPA was working against them in-- turn after turn.

And so they've always said, we want clean water. But we want to be part of the solution. And so I think that was a message that the folks not only in my state but around the country— want people to listen to them and know that they're here, know that they have a lot to contribute and make our country stronger.

CORNISH: You mentioned concerns about the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency. When you look at these cabinet choices by the incoming administration, which one are you worried about? Because there are Democrats who look at them and say, you've got picks who want to abolish the departments they may be leading, who want to roll back major Democrat-penned legislation like Obamacare. Which one do you think Democrats should challenge?

DONNELLY: I'm very concerned about the Tom Price nomination because he talks about privatizing Medicare… He talks about privatizing Medicare. You know, our seniors shouldn't have to check their stock balance before they can get knee surgery. And we're going to stand up for our seniors on this issue. I'm also very concerned about the nominee named today, Rex Tillerson, for secretary of state. I'm very, very concerned about the Russian connections that we're seeing, the potential damage to our national security and the lack of experience. And so I'm concerned about both of those. I think that General Mattis is a good choice in Defense, though.

CORNISH: You know, when you were first elected back when you're elected in the House, it was with Blue Dogs, right? There was, like, a whole coalition of red-state Democrats. That's been decimated.

DONNELLY: I'm a proud Blue Dog, absolutely.

CORNISH: Now you're here in the Senate with, again, just a handful of other Blue Dogs. This is not a group of Democrats that's growing. Can Democrats regain the ground that they've lost with voters in states like yours?

DONNELLY: When we talk to them about issues of importance to them, when we talk to them about their family and making sure that we can have better skills training for their kids to get good jobs - that we can try to keep jobs here in America rather than seeing them go overseas - that we'll fight for our friends and neighbors. We'll fight for the people of Muncie and Richmond and Evansville. When they hear...

CORNISH: But you don't think Democrats have been doing that up until this point?

DONNELLY: Well, not when we've had trade deals that have ship jobs overseas, absolutely not. What we need to do is stand up and fight for our people in our states.

And Donnelly isn’t even the worst of the right-of-center Democrats from red states up in 2018. Obviously he has an “F” from ProgressivePunch, but his overall record for the just ended session (48.19) is actually worse than Dianne Feinstein’s, Tim Kaine’s, Mark Warner’s and Tom Carper’s. The only Senate Dems with more putrid records are Joe Manchin (44.58), Claire McCaskill (42.68) and Heidi Heitkamp (40.96). Donnelly’s voting record is way closer to Rand Paul’s than it is to even moderates like Debbie Stabenow, Gary Peters or Ron Wyden, let alone to progressives like Bernie, Mazie Hirono, Tammy Baldwin or Elizabeth Warren.

Republicans Are Still Obstructing Judicial Nominations

Just before adjourning for another vacation on Friday, the Senate finally voted to end the obstructionist right-wing filibuster against Michelle Friedland, who had been nominated for a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on August 1, 2013. She was rated unanimously "well qualified" by the American Bar Association. In January the Senate Judiciary Committee voted, by a wide bipartisan margin, 14-3, to forward the nomination on to the full Senate. But Miss McConnell and the other poutraged extremists have been doing everything they could to clock her and obstruct the nomination. Finally, April 10, 2014 the motion to invoke cloture was agreed to by a vote of 56-41, every Democrat and two Republicans voted to proceed with a final vote, which-- because of more McConnell obstructionism, can't happen until April 28.

Why do Republicans hate her so much? It's not just because she's a woman. It's not just because she was born in Berkeley. It's not just because she was a brilliant student who graduated at the top of her Stanford Law class after studying philosophy at Oxford (on a Fulbright scholarship). It is true that Republicans generally hate all of those things but their collected animus for Freidland went even deeper. An unhinged form-letter sent in February to right-wing Republican senators from a veritable who's who among American neo-fascist movers and shakers demanded they vote against her confirmation. They warned that "her record leaves little doubt that, were she confirmed, Friedland would abuse judicial power and usurp the legislative powers of the Senate, the House, and other law-making bodies.

Richard Viguerie's ConservativeHQ called her "another radical nominee unfit for the bench. They were unimpressed that she had clerked for Republican Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and that O'Connor testified on behalf of the nomination. "Friedland’s record," to the neo-fascist and Confederate communities, "indicates a clear disregard for 'separation of powers' and a government run 'by the people,' and her radical interpretation of judicial power has led her to create new rights while ignoring those long enjoyed by Americans. According to her own writings, rights begin and end with judges. Her amicus briefs have sought to limit religious liberty, and she recently dismissed traditional Judeo-Christians beliefs on homosexuality as a “discredited practice." You may read that as a bunch of radical right mumbo-jumbo, but these people take themselves very seriously:

She has repeatedly advocated international judges as authorities over state law and holds such a radical belief in judicial supremacy that even the most liberal Senator should heavily weigh the implications of her confirmation. Her judicial philosophy seeks to make the legislative branch completely irrelevant. Confirming Michelle Friedland would be another blow to the idea of a limited judiciary.

Not only would she be a deplorable judge, but Harry Reid’s complete usurpation of power should not be rewarded and deserves a bold response. Conservatives should work adamantly to defeat her by ensuring their Senators vote no on confirmation. At the end of the day, however, the only way to end the tyranny of the judiciary is to elect a conservative Senate, starting in November of 2014.

…Over the past 60 years, liberals have stealthily and intermittently begun confirming radical activists to the courts. Although Senate procedure provides the power of the “filibuster” to stop or stall nominees, Senators have often neglected to stop bad nominees, generally deeming them to be the President’s prerogative. As a result, virtually no issue goes untouched by the courts.

From religious liberty to property rights, and most recently from marriage to government-run healthcare, the American way of life has fallen prey to decisions from judges who legislate liberal policies from the bench. Phyllis Schlafly has written extensively on this topic and in her book The Supremacists notes that these individuals have “replaced the rule of law with the rule of judges.” 

People for the American Way had a very different perspective, far more in synch with the way most people who have looked into Friedland's career see her.

Friedland was one of many superb, highly qualified judges caught up in Republicans' blanket obstruction of judicial nominees, and President Obama was forced to re-nominate her for the court this year. After today’s vote, she still faces 30 hours of potential "post-cloture debate," unless Republicans allow the Senate to move forward on the nomination more expeditiously.

Even though the Senate changed its filibuster rule for judicial and executive branch nominations, lowering the threshold from 60 votes to a simple majority in order to invoke cloture and advance nominees toward confirmation votes, Republicans continue to force cloture votes as a procedural hurdle. The delay created by these votes and the subsequent 30-hour wait before a confirmation can occur amounts to a stubborn form of obstruction in itself.

And this is just one way that Senate Republicans are continuing to hold up the judicial nomination process. Judicial nominees from states with Republican senators also face unreasonable, meritless obstruction due the GOP's abuse of the Senate's "blue slip" policy, by which a senator can unilaterally put a permanent hold on a nominee from his or her state before they even get a hearing.

Is Obama Going To Continue Making The Federal Judiciary Overly Friendly To Corporate Criminals?

When's the last time we asked you to sign a petition? Right… never. But our friends at Daily Kos are offering the kind of strategic initiative that appeals to us. They want progressives to express their frustration with President Obama's tendency to fill the judiciary with corporate lawyers. It's been making a lot of us sick? Not you? Did you know that just over 70% of President Obama's judicial nominees have been corporate lawyers? And less than 4% have been public interest lawyers… just 10 since he was inaugurated in 2009!

Their petition to the President is short and to the point:

Every day we learn about the multiple ways large corporations are destroying democracy in this country. It is time to stop nominating corporate lawyers to the federal bench, and to instead nominate qualified public interest lawyers.

As Kos activist Paul Hogarth put it, "If you want to know how we got awful court decisions like Citizens United, "it’s because we have too many corporate lawyers on the judiciary. And we need to level the playing field."

George W. Bush was the first president to appoint a Chief Justice since Reagan elevated Nixon appointee William Rehnquist in 1986. Years earlier Rehnquist had served as a GOP polling thug in Phoenix whose job was to intimidate Hispanic-Americans and prevent them from voting. What better choice for Chief Justice? When he finally joined Satan in Hell, Bush nominated John Roberts (2005), a corporate hack from the white shoe DC firm Hogan and Hartson (now Hogan Lovells, which represents every kind of criminal predator on the face of the earth, from pharmaceutical conglomerates and banksters to murderous dictatorships). Lawyers from these kinds of firms don't have the same kind of moral compass that normal people have. Completely unfit to serve, he was confirmed on September 29, 2005 78-22, half the Democrats joining every Republican to back him. Among the Democrats still in the Senate who voted for him back then were Tom Carper, Tim Johnson, Mary Landrieu, Pat Leahy, Carl Levin, Patty Murray, Bill Nelson, Mark Pryor, Jay Rockefeller, and Ron Wyden. Most progressives voted NO (as did then-Senator Barack Obama). No Roberts, no Citizens United? He was sure a force behind that anti-democracy ruling, something the senators who voted to confirm him should be helped accountable for. Hard to imagine that the same Obama who had the good sense to vote against confirming John Roberts has nominated Georgia right-wing extremist Michael Boggs.

One thing that has most cheered me politically in recent months is the tumultuous reception-- by normal people, not political types or the media folks who regurgitate their press releases and talking points-- that voters have given too independent progressive Marianne Williamson in CA-33. The first legit opportunity to break the two-Beltway-party monopoly since Bernie Sanders pulled it off in Vermont. And, yes Democrats fought and denigrated Bernie in Vermont the same way they're fighting and denigrating Marianne here in L.A. The love trying to paint her as a "New Age guru," something less than serious. Yeah, less serious than "ex"-Republican hack Wendy Greuel? Here are some of the statements Marianne has made about why she's running. Do you think she'll be rubber-stamping any corporatist moves Obama makes in his last two years in office?

The biggest threat to our country today is not from armies invading our shores. The biggest threat to our democracy is not bombs falling from the sky over an American city. No, our biggest threat is a pattern of a thousand cuts-- the slow but now constant chipping away at our democratic freedoms-- one capitulation to moneyed interests at a time, one politically gerrymandered district at a time, one government surveillance program at a time, one limiting of our voting rights at a time, one intimidation of journalists at a time, one Patriot Act at a time, one National Defense Authorization Act at a time, one Trans Pacific Partnership so-called trade deal limiting our sovereignty at a time. So at what point-- after how many moments when Americans mutter to ourselves “Ya gotta be kidding me!”-- do we stand up to our own government and say, “Hey, guys! Whose side are you on??”

…I am running for Congress because I believe America has gone off the democratic rails. A toxic brew of shrinking civil liberties, expanded corporate influence and domestic surveillance is poisoning our democracy.

We are currently in the process of dismantling the most basic social contract between the American people and our government, as "a government of the people, by the people, and for the people" has transitioned before our eyes into "a government of a few of the people, by a few of the people, and for a few of the people." A purpose of American progress is to expand the democratic franchise, not constrict it. Yet today, that franchise is being narrowed for everyone. The American people now need to defend our country against a hostile takeover by multi-national corporate interests.

…The undue influence of money on our politics is the issue underlying all other issues, and we need a national movement supporting a Constitutional Amendment outlawing the undue influence of money on our politics. If elected, I will work with those in and outside Congress who are working on this already-- for I feel, as many people do, that getting money out of politics is the greatest moral challenge of our generation.

The polar opposite of a DCCC mystery meat candidate, who is forbidden from putting anything substantive on a website, on Marianne's official campaign website, there's a page called Democracy At Risk. It starts with a quote from Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis-- no Clarence Thomas or John Roberts: “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

Democracy itself is at risk today, fiercely assaulted by combined forces of money and power. This assault is in my view our single largest challenge – the issue underlying all other issues.

This organized, well-funded assault seeks the destruction of our bedrock democratic foundations: voting rights; fair representation; and the principle of one person, one vote. Voter suppression laws being passed throughout the country violate our voting rights. Politically driven gerrymandering, making a shift from voters choosing winners to winners choosing voters, violates the principle of fair representation. And Citizens United has substituted the formula of one dollar, one vote for the democratic principle of one person, one vote.

A solid drift in the direction of the financial dominance of our politics-- aided and abetted, indeed led in some cases, by our own Supreme Court-- now threatens to overpower our democracy. In fact, contrary to recent Supreme Court rulings, money is not speech and corporations are not people. The citizens of a democracy have the right to organize around ideas and not just money. Yet, money dangerously controls not only our politics but even our discussion of political issues.

We need a state by state rejection of politicized gerrymandering (California has joined Iowa and Florida in starting this process). We need a Constitutional Amendment to override Citizens United to make way for public financing of our political campaigns, and possibly an Amendment as well to guarantee every citizen the right to vote. In addition, we need to repeal the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that gave permission for media cross-ownership and helped tear down the firewall between journalism and corporate promotion. Once the distribution of our news became controlled by a relatively few corporate entities, our society’s political conversation became narrowed to a dangerous degree. The narrowing of our political options inevitably followed.

These issues are the cornerstones of any serious effort to reclaim our democracy.

Obama's Big Misstep With Michael Boggs

Can NARAL save America from Michael Boggs?

Shenna Bellows is a brilliant, independent-minded and dedicated progressive running for the Maine Senate seat current occupied by Susan Collins ®. This morning we were talking about President Obama's shocking nomination of a right-wing ideologue from Georgia to the federal bench, Michael Boggs. I can't imagine Bellows ever voting to confirm someone like Boggs, regardless of what president-- and from which party-- nominates him. "Effective coalition building," she told me, "should never mean compromising our most important values. Too often, bipartisanship has meant capitulation on women's rights and civil rights to the most extreme right-wing elements of the Republican party, and that's exactly what has happened with the Boggs nomination. When it comes to lifetime appointments to the judiciary, I will never waiver in standing up for the constitutional freedoms of all Americans."

Our friends at NARAL alerted us to the problem last week and Jennifer Bendery broke it open nationally for HuffPo yesterday. Obama isn't scoring any points with women's rights groups, civil rights leaders, progressive organizations or even independent-minded Members of Congress with his nomination of Boggs, a former radical right state legislator, to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. NARAL has alerted this members and allies that Boggs voted to "channel funds to anti-choice crisis pregnancy centers and make a parental consent law even more extreme… We’re disappointed that pro-choice President Obama nominated someone who doesn’t share our pro-choice values. We agree with the president on a lot of things, but not this pick. Speak out now and call on your senators to oppose a nominee who can’t be trusted with our rights."

Boggs has already come under fire from civil rights icons Joseph Lowery and Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.)-- both of whom were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Obama-- for a vote Boggs took in opposition to removing the Confederate insignia from Georgia's flag. They teamed up with Georgia's Democratic congressional lawmakers in December to urge Obama to rescind Boggs' nomination and start the process over.

Lowery, for one, was so baffled by the president's choice that he said it must have been a staff error. "I think [Obama] must have left it to somebody else," Lowery told HuffPost last month. "It was a mistake."

As if that isn't enough pushback from his base, Obama may also have to contend with anger from LGBT rights groups over Boggs' past vote against same-sex marriage.

"There's no question that he has a number of very troublesome positions," said Fred Sainz, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign. "We are closely examining his record. Typically, we don't develop a position until after there's a hearing."

…Boggs appears so out-of-step with Obama's past nominees because he is part of an all-or-nothing package of six judicial nominees agreed to by the president and Georgia's two Republican senators, Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson, months ago. Obama made some pretty big concessions: Four of the six nominees are GOP picks, and just one of the six is African American -- a lack of diversity that Georgia Democrats argue doesn't reflect the population those judges will oversee.

DFA is one of several progressive groups generally supportive of Obama's nominees that is balking at this one. Spokesman Neil Sroka: "It's downright appalling that the Obama administration would give in to right-wing obstruction and nominate ... an anti-choice, anti-equality candidate for the federal bench. Putting forward a right-wing candidate that would make George W. Bush think twice for a lifetime judicial appointment isn't horse-trading; it's caving on core progressive values, period… We'll most likely be supportive of opposition efforts in any way we can."

Boggs, currently a member of the Georgia Court of Appeals, can be accurately described as an anti-choice fanatic who worked diligently to take away the rights of women to make their own reproductive health decisions, even when pregnancies were the result of rape and/or incest. The fact that he's also a racist and a virulent homophobe makes him an odd choice for Democrats… or does it?

Just look at the candidates the DCCC has recruited too run for Congress. Steve Israel, steeped in personal corruption and an "ex"-Blue Dog from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, has gone out of his way to find and fund conservative candidates and disadvantage progressives at every opportunity. We've written many times about anti-Choice, fake Democrats that the DCCC is funding, Jerry Cannon (MI) and Jennifer Garrison (OH) being two of the worst. Back in 2009, when Garrison was trying to win the Democratic nomination for Ohio Secretary of State, NARAL help defeat her with this e-mail:

Last week, Jennifer Garrison, a Democrat from Marietta, officially entered the race for Ohio’s Secretary of State. Jennifer Garrison currently serves in the Ohio House of Representatives and has a 0% rating from NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio.

Rep. Garrison showed just how extreme her anti-choice position is when she filled out the 2008 candidate questionnaire for Ohio Right to Life, saying she would:

• support legislation in Ohio to outlaw abortion (with only an exception to save a woman’s life),

• support legislation that would allow pharmacists to refuse to dispense emergency contraception, and

• support state funding for so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” that lie to women about the risks of abortion and never refer patients for abortion or birth control services.

Representative Garrison does not share our values.

Someone who does is a lifelong progressive Democrat, Marianne Williamson, who seems to have decided the "progressive" was more important to her than the "Democrat." She reregistered as an independent and is running for Congress in the seat Henry Waxman is giving up (CA-33-- Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Malibu, Venice, Redondo Beach, Calabasas). She pointed to Boggs' nomination as exactly the kind of DC deal-making that has confirmed her decision to run as an independent in the same way Bernie Sanders has. "It's imperative," she told me this morning, "that our reproductive rights be protected, and  I'm very disappointed that the President would choose to nominate a judge who does not honor a woman's right to choose. While the President has stated repeatedly that he honors Roe v. Wade, clearly the back room wrangling and deal-making in Washington led him to nominate an anti-choice candidate. I look forward to being an independent Congresswoman who has only my constituents, and not party bosses, to contend with in deciding my votes."

In another context entirely, Marianne Williamson released a statement about women's involvement in politics. I thought it belonged in this post. I certainly points out the difference between progressive values-driven women like herself and careerist shills like Garrison. Marianne: "We need to move beyond a conversation that simply focuses on getting more women into office, or even getting more women voting. We need to be stressing what true feminine values would mean in a political context, and what extraordinary power the women of America could be wielding on behalf of our society."

Sen. Pat Leahy, on the latest GOP judicial filibuster: "I've never seen anything like this"

NYT caption: Robert L. Wilkins, left, with President Obama and other nominees in June, was picked to fill one of three vacancies on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

"The American people and our judicial system deserve better."

-- President Obama

"Appointing judges to fill vacant judicial seats is not court-packing. It's a president's right as well as his duty."

-- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid

"I've never seen anything like this."

-- Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy

by Ken

I realize the latest Senate Republican judicial filibuster yesterday was totally expected, and at this point can be thought of as simply "yet another one." Nevertheless, I think attention must be paid.

The Republicans do this because they believe that there is no price to be paid, or that any piddling cost can be easily absorbed and will pay back dividends many times over. At this point you have to wonder if it isn't their goal to goad Senate Democrats to resort to the nuclear option and overthrow the filibuster. And then, just as Republicans are warning now, Democrats will rue the day.

Look at the quantity of human filth with which George W. Bush infested the federal courts with the option of the filibuster -- people of such degraded vileness that they should be living in cages under strict hazardous-waste quarantine. Now that Republicans have made themselves officially the party of mental disease and degradation, put a Republican in the White House and a Republican majority in the Senate, and there will be truly no limit.

As Fred Wertheimer points out at the end of the NYT piece below, not only are the Republicans quite prepared to exercise the nuclear option themselves if and when it suits them, they know how to make it a win-win situation -- winning if they go nuclear or merely threaten to do so. "The reality," says Fred, "is that the Republicans were willing to do this before and gained enormous advantage in the deal that was made to prevent it."

Obama Pick for Court Is 3rd in a Row Blocked by Republicans

By JEREMY W. PETERS
Published: November 18, 2013

WASHINGTON -- Senate Republicans on Monday blocked President Obama's third consecutive nominee to the country's most powerful and prestigious appeals court and insisted they would not back down, inflaming a bitter debate over a president's right to shape the judiciary.

By a vote of 53 to 38, the Senate failed to break a filibuster of Robert L. Wilkins, a federal judge who was nominated to fill one of three vacancies on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, falling seven votes short of the 60 needed. Two Republicans -- Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine -- voted with the Democrats.

The impasse over Mr. Wilkins followed Republican blockades of two other candidates for the court since Oct. 31. Unlike previous fights over judicial nominees, the dispute is not as much about the judges' individual political leanings as it is about the overall ideological makeup of the court. Republicans have raised few objections to the three candidates' qualifications or legal positions.

Rather, Republicans are seeking to prevent Mr. Obama from filling any of the three existing vacancies on the 11-seat court, fearing that he will alter its conservative tilt. The court has immense political importance because it often rules on questions involving White House and federal agency policy.

Democrats accused Republicans of exercising a nakedly political double standard for confirming presidential nominees.

"Appointing judges to fill vacant judicial seats is not court-packing," Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, said Monday. "It's a president's right as well as his duty."

After the vote, Mr. Obama issued a statement saying he was being held to an unfair standard. "Four of my predecessor's six nominees to the D.C. Circuit were confirmed," he said. "Four of my five nominees to this court have been obstructed."

Mr. Obama added, "The American people and our judicial system deserve better."

Republicans have argued that the court does not have a caseload large enough to merit filling the vacancies, and they have proposed legislation to shrink it by three seats. But that has no chance of becoming law in a Democratic-controlled Senate, so instead they have vowed to block any nominees for that court.

For one day at least, business on Capitol Hill shifted away from the problematic effort to carry out the president's health care law, prompting Republicans to accuse Democrats of trying to change the subject.

"Unfortunately, the Senate will not be voting on legislation to allow Americans to keep their health insurance if they like it," said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader. "Rather, we will be voting on another nominee to a court that doesn't have enough work to do. The Senate ought to be spending its time dealing with a real crisis, not a manufactured one."

Republicans are making a bold gamble: Hold firm and allow no more judges to get through while hoping that Democrats do not alter filibuster rules so that the minority can no longer block judges. At times, they have dared Democrats to change the rules, saying that any move to stop filibusters will haunt them if the Senate and the White House ever flip back to Republican control and a seat opens on the Supreme Court.

Senate aides said Monday that members of the Democratic leadership had started to gauge support for a rules change inside its caucus. Any changes would require 51 of the 55 members aligned with Democrats.

Mr. Reid can bring the stalled nominees back up again at any time, individually or all at once.

Judge Wilkins became the fourth of Mr. Obama's choices for the District of Columbia court to be blocked by Republicans this year. Angry Democrats, noting that Judge Wilkins is African-American and that the three other nominees are women, said Republicans were stifling diversity.

Democrats have sought to portray Republicans as callous to the concerns of women and minorities.

Judge Wilkins, who serves on the United States District Court and was confirmed three years ago in a unanimous voice vote, gained national prominence in a case that helped popularize the term "driving while black" when he sued the Maryland State Police after they pulled him over in the 1990s.

Patricia Ann Millett, who was filibustered late last month, has argued nearly three dozen cases before the Supreme Court. To bolster Ms. Millett, whose husband serves in the military, friends from military spouse support groups have come to the Capitol to plead her case.

Cornelia T. L. Pillard, rejected last week, is a law professor at Georgetown who litigated racial discrimination cases for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc.

Caitlin J. Halligan, who went down in a filibuster earlier this year, is the general counsel for the Manhattan district attorney. She has withdrawn her nomination.

Republicans are on the verge of exhausting the last bit of tolerance Democrats have shown for such regular use of the filibuster on nominations. Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the Senate's longest-serving current member, who has fought to safeguard the institution's traditions, said Monday that momentum was building toward a rules change -- a move so controversial that it is referred to as the nuclear option.

"I've never seen anything like this," Mr. Leahy said.

By the Republicans' own count, the cases scheduled for oral argument per active judge on the court has declined, but not by a large amount. They have said there were 90 per judge in 2006 compared with 81 this year. The Senate has confirmed only one of Mr. Obama's nominees for the court, Srikanth Srinivasan, in May.

Democrats do not have entirely clean hands on the subject of filibustering nominees to the District of Columbia court. In 2003, when Democrats were a minority in the Senate, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York persuaded initially reluctant members of his party to take what was considered an extreme step at the time: blocking a confirmation vote on Miguel Estrada, a lawyer nominated by President George W. Bush to fill a vacant seat on the court. Altogether that year, Democrats blocked six judicial nominees by using the filibuster.

Republicans eventually threatened to make the same rule change Democrats are considering now. But they backed down after a bipartisan group of 14 senators agreed to approve the circuit court judicial nominees awaiting confirmation. Mr. Estrada had withdrawn, but another conservative judge, Janice Rogers Brown, was put on the District of Columbia appeals court.

Many senators and outside advocates have begun to ask whether the atmosphere has grown so poisoned that Democrats see little reason to hold back.

Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a group that advocates transparency in government and campaign finance, said Republicans would be likely to exercise the nuclear option themselves if they ever faced a Democratic blockade of important nominees.

"The reality is that the Republicans were willing to do this before and gained enormous advantage in the deal that was made to prevent it," he said, referring to the compromise by the group of 14 senators. "We're not in a situation where the tradition and rules and history of the Senate are being recognized today. We're in a situation where politics and partisan reasons have overridden the sense that there are rules of fair play that must be maintained."

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No thanks to Senate Republican obstructionists, Democratic-appointed judges begin to take their place in the federal judiciary

by Ken

It seems to me just a matter of time before those polls showing voters ready to punish Republicans for the antics of their farthest-right cohort start to fade. Even the Teabaggers are likely to be let off the hook, but it's not going to be that long before we're hearing that only the unabashed nutjobs, the certified far-right crazies, are to be held accountable for turning the functioning of our government into a pirate-themed carnival.

So it seems to me all the more important to get out the word that the modern-day Republican Party is hooliganish, mentally defective garbage, and that anyone who considers voting for one of these creatures should be indicted for aiding and abetting. Case in point: the aspect of the Republicans' monolithic Just Say No to Obama policy which pertains to presidential appointments, in particular judgeships -- after all those years of whining, when Chimpy the Then-Prez was sending fistfuls of judicial nominations of people who at mininmum should have been in institutional care, that the vile Democrats had a solemn obligation to permit an up-or-down vote. Of course it all makes sense when you remember that modern-day Republicans believe that they have been granted the right to lie every time they open their toxic traps.

Now, of course, as the president has ramped up his nominating process, there's an especially large contingent of nominees facing the annual holiday blight, as our "In the Loop" pal Al Kamen reports:

What is that creaking sound? Ah, yes. That's the window starting to close on folks still hoping to put on those black robes before the Senate takes off for the holidays in December.

The good news is that, if you're one of the nine nominees -- seven for district judgeships, two for appeals courts -- who have already reached the Senate floor, you've got a decent shot at confirmation before the Senate recess. That's especially true for the seven who got unanimous votes in committee.

An additional 10 nominees have had hearings and are awaiting only a committee vote to get to the full Senate, which should happen by early next month. That's plenty of time to make it to the floor.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, which usually takes up three or four district judgeships and one appellate judgeship at each hearing, may have time to approve as many as 27 more nominees to go to the full body, for a total of 46.

But here's where it gets tricky. Controversial nominees, meaning those approved by the committee largely with Democratic support, will have a tough time getting through in the rush to adjourn.

There's more than holiday cheer standing between those nominees and confirmation, though.

Even those with substantial GOP support may have trouble getting pushed through in the Senate's traditional end-of-the-year wrap-up.

That's because the wrap-up tradition appears to have fallen victim to the increasingly bitter partisanship on the Hill. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) has previously noted that the GOP left 17 noncontroversial judicial wannabes on the floor in 2010 and 18 in 2011. The nasty fights over the shutdown and the debt ceiling aren't likely to have done much for comity.

Surprisingly, Al reports, the federal judiciary had begun to take on an Obama tinge.

A new report by the liberal Alliance for Justice finds that as of Sept. 25, President Obama, after an extraordinarily slow start, has moved way ahead of George W. Bush on nominations. Obama has made 271 nominations, compared with 240 for Bush II at this point in his presidency. . . .

At this point, Democrats have edged ahead in the number of appointees on the 179-member U.S. courts of appeals, the report found. The percentage of Republican-appointed appeals judges -- 61.3 percent when Bush II left office -- has dropped to 49.4 percent, the report found. Republicans maintain a thin lead of 50.3 percent of the nation's 678 federal district judges.

It remains true that "only 75 percent of Obama's nominees have been confirmed, compared with 90 percent for Bush," and "at this point, Bush had put 215 judges on the bench, while Obama has put on 203."

The process of choosing judicial nominees who can survive the Republican grinder is probably responsible for a depressing fail on the president's part. We know how shrewd Republican presidents have become about appointing the youngest candidates they can find, provided they can nevertheless show sufficiently sociopathic credentials. By contrast,

In the first term, Obama deftly improved on the Democrats' policy of minimizing their impact on the federal judiciary by appointing the oldest judges ever, going back to the Jimmy Carter administration, the report found. Obama's confirmed appeals judges are on average nearly four years older than Bush II's and 4.7 years older than George H.W. Bush's. (The average age of more recent nominees, however, is significantly lower.)

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The DAmN Party (aka GOP) rampages onward in its take-no-prisoners assault on truth, justice, and the American way

Confirmation yesterday by the Senate Judiciary Committee was the second step toward the failure of Nina Pillard's nomination to the District Circuit Court of Appeals, which began with the president's announcement of her nomination.

by Ken

I had to really scrutinize a washingtonpost.com "Fix" item the other day, "Ted Cruz vs. House Republicans," to grasp the nature of the reported rupture in the Capitol Hill GOP, occasioned by the exhortation of Texas Sen. Ted "Rock Brain" Cruz to his fellow GOP-ers in the House to stand firm when the Senate strips their latest legislative stratagem in their unrelenting war to Destroy America Now (DAmN), the defunding of the new health-care law, from the stopgap spending bill that would prevent a government shutdown, and sends the continuing-resolution bill back to the House.

Me, I thought it was nothing more than a statement of solidarity among the congressional Princelings of Darkness. Obviously the Senate isn't going to go along with the madness, and so it's going to be left to the two houses of Congress to figure out where to go from there. All Senator Rock Brain was doing, as far as I could tell, was exhorting his House co-partisans to stand fast in waging their fight against America.

This, however, is where you need to be able to think like a DAmN-er and see the world through that dark, twisted filter. Viewing that way, apparently, what you see is Senator Rock Brain thumbing his nose at his psychopathic House colleagues' attempt to dump the ball in their Senate co-partisans' court. It seems that the House DAmN-ers were declaring that they've done their part and now it's time for the Senate DAmN-ers to tote that barge.

What Cruz is essentially saying is right. The Democratic-controlled Senate simply isn't going to sign off on a bill that defunds Obamacare. They'll strip that part out and send a new bill back to the House. Then, GOP leaders in the lower chamber will have to decide their next move.

But it's the subtext of Cruz's statement that irks House Republicans. He's getting the fight he asked for -- the Senate will get a bill that does exactly what he wants. Yet already, he's signaling likely defeat and seeking to shift responsibility in the debate back to House Republicans.

Cruz's push to build support in the upper chamber for defundung Obamacare through a continuing resolution has gone virtually nowhere. Only about a dozen Republican senators are in his corner while others have publicly lambasted the idea.

By agreeing to vote on a CR that defunds Obamacare, House Speaker John Boehner's message was simple: It's your turn, Senate Republicans. You take up this fight, now. Don't blame us for inaction anymore.

Whew! The GOP-ers have subtext! With "thinking" like this, it's no wonder that the DAmN-ers are always in such a state of superhuman stress and rage. Of course "thinking" like this will do that to you.

Fortunately for the Senate DAmN-ers, they have an opportunity to point out to their pipsqueak inferior-house colleagues that even as the minority party in the Senate they've been carrying the heavy load of making it impossible, or as difficult as possible, for the Obama administration to govern, by playing their anti-constitutional game of "Supermajority! Supermajority!," since the House DAmN-ers were still wetting their pants as the minority party. And nowhere have they performed more wreckingly than in their refusal to allow the president to staff the government.

It seems like longer, but it's really not that long ago that President Obama, buoyed by his decisive reelection, started acting like someone determined to actually exercise the authority of the presidency. Among other things, he finally named three candidates to fill the vacancies on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, considered the country's second-highest court, behind the U.S. Supreme Court (for which it has in fact been a frequent feeder).

In those heady days I don't remember hearing a lot of talk about the likelihood of getting those nominees confirmed. Now our Washington Post pal Al "In the Loop" Kamen reminds us that frequently in our nation's capital the real news is the opposite of what it seems.

That's one hurdle . . ..

The Senate Judiciary Committee, on a party-line 10 to 8 vote Thursday, approved the nomination of Georgetown law professor and former Justice Department lawyer Nina Pillard to be a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Her chances of confirmation by the full Senate, however, may fall in the slim-to-none range. The vote overcame, for now, strong opposition from Republicans who said Pillard held "extreme" and "activist" views. . . .

Holding "extreme" and "activist" views is just a DAmN way of saying "not screechingly criminally insane." As we'll see in a moment, the DAmN-ers will grasp at any straw to provide cover for their deeply held political ideology, which has evolved from "We Hate That Obama" in the president's first term to "If You Thought We Hated That [racially tinged obscenity deleted] Obama Before, You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet" in the second term.

Pillard is the second of three Obama nominees approved by the committee for long-standing vacancies on the D.C. Circuit, often called the second most important court in the country.

Another nominee, Patricia Millett, also was a approved on a party-line 10 to 8 vote in committee, on Aug. 1, though Republicans didn’t criticize her qualifications, arguing that the court didn’t need any more judges. The third nominee, U.S. District Judge Robert Wilkins, is expected to have a committee vote in the next few weeks.

It appears likely that Senate Republicans will move to block confirmation of all three nominees, preserving the existing 4 to 4 split between Republicans and Democrats on the appeals court.

Did you get that? The District Circuit doesn't need any more judges! How inoffensive must Patricia Millett be if that's the best the DAmN-ers could come up with to justify a unified-party-line vote against her?

And of course if we play another round of our beloved party game "If the Shoe Were on the Other Foot," just imagine a Republican president sending the Senate a judicial nominee in the mold of, say, the Lying Idiot Alito, and Senate Democrats announcing unified opposition (hey, we're just imagining here) on the ground that the court in question has enough judges.

The message I get from the Senate Republicans is: "We hate America so much that we no longer feel the need to make up minimally believable lies to cover our tracks." Ya gotta love 'em.

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For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

Suddenly it turns out that the Senate CAN confirm administration nominations after all

So Young Johnny McCranky is the "hero" of today's compromise in which Senate Republicans averted the threatened Democratic filibuster nuclear option. Whattaguy! Why, he's contributed so much to Senate "bipartisanship" all through these first four and a half years of the Obama presidency.

by Ken

So it turns out that sometimes, at least, if you push back against sociopathic, America-hating Republican obstructionists, they give way.

Today by a 71-29 vote the Senate voted to proceed with the nomination of former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Cordray is already serving as the bureau's first director, on a recess appointment that would have expired next January.

The Cordray nomination, you'll recall, had been pending for two years, with a sizable cadre of Republicans committed to never confirming a director for the CFPB while they continue their efforts to destroy it. To those Republicans, the very idea of protecting consumers is anathema. The role of consumers to the corporatist stooges, is to be bent, mutilated, and where possible raped. In the corporatist system those slimeballs are paid well to set consumers up as patsies.

And now after those two years, the implacable opposition to allowing a vote on the Cordray nomination dissolves in a 71-29 vote, in which 17 Republicans joined the 54 Democrats and independents. I suppose there is some sentiment that those 17 GOP-ers are to be congratulated. I would suggest that rather they should be forced to return every penny in salary and perks, not to mention fund-raising, collected over every day that they prevented the Cordray nomination from moving forward, now that they have acknowledged that instead of doing their job they were suing some toxic, rapacious agenda.

The Cordray unblockage was made possible by a deal arrived at early today between the warring Senate parties. The Washington Post's Aaron Blake reported:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) credited Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) with crafting the deal. "John McCain is the reason we're at the point that we are," Reid said. "Nobody was able to break through but for him. And he does it at his own peril."

Yeah, Harry, a real hero is Young Johnny McCranky. Never mind that he's one of those doody-sucking stiffs who's been sitting on his fat ass all this time. If he had any sense of decency or history, he would have accompanied his heroic peacemaking today by putting a bullet in his brain, to more fairly sum up his time in public life.

It's not entirely a return to sanity, because the same worthless-garbage affronts to sanity remain on the job, ready to resume their role as America-hating obstructionists at any second. Still, it does seem finally to have occurred to them that they have something to lose after all these years of behaving like tin-pot Latin American oligarchs.

Here's how ThinkProgress's Progress Report reported the deal:

GOP Blockade of Nominees Collapses

Today was supposed to be D-Day when it came to the so-called nuclear option in the Senate -- a relatively minor change in the Senate rules to stop a minority of senators from using the filibuster as a means of nullifying democratically created government agencies and functions that they object to purely for ideological reasons.

After a three and a half hour meeting last night and ongoing negotiations through this morning, senators announced a deal to avert changing the Senate rules. Nevertheless, the deal represents a huge victory for Democrats and an almost unconditional surrender on the part of Senate Republicans.

Here’s the main elements of the deal:

• The president’s nominees to head the Department of Labor, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Export-Import Bank, and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) will be confirmed without delay.
• Two of the president’s current nominees to the National Labor Relations Board will be withdrawn; however, Republicans agree in advance to confirm any two nominees of the president’s choosing before the Senate recesses in August.
• Democrats retain the right to revisit changing the filibuster rules on executive branch nominees at any time should Republicans once again begin a blockade.

Interestingly, Senate Minority Leader McConnell (R-KY) had offered a deal last night that would have also confirmed the current group of seven nominees, but would’ve required Democrats to promise to never again threaten to change the rules. Senate Majority Leader Reid (D-NV) wisely rejected this offer in favor of the offer outlined above made by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and a group of breakaway Republicans.

Real progress has already been made as a result of this deal. CFPB nominee Richard Cordray had been prevented from receiving an up-or-down vote by Senate Republicans for 730 days. Following today’s deal, a cloture motion on his nomination passed 71-29 and a final confirmation vote is expected later today.

Hopefully this new spirit of cooperation from Senate Republicans will also extend to other areas. The president deserves up-or-down votes on his judicial nominations, which have also faced unprecedented levels of obstruction and delay from some Senate Republicans. In particular, we look forward to timely votes on the president’s three nominations to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

BOTTOM LINE: Today’s deal does not fix all of the problems with the Senate, but it represents a huge victory for consumers, workers, and anyone who cares about clean air and water. In addition, the deal underscores that a unified Democrat caucus can stand up to unprecedented Republican obstructionism and get results.

I'll go along that it's a better day than the Senate has had in a while, and certainly one of the better days during the Obama presidency. But that's saying so little that I'm inclined to go easy on the hosannas. Let's wait and see what happens if the weeks and months to come.

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For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

D.C. Circuit appeals-court nominee Caitlin Halligan drops the other shoe gently

Sure, there are plenty of dumb and/or corrupt Democrats. But today's Republicans really seem to represent a biological breach -- some sort of mysterious reversal in the course of evolution.

"I am confident that with Caitlin's impressive qualifications and reputation, she would have served with distinction."

-- President Obama, about Ms. Halligan's withdrawal from
consideration for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals

by Ken

Both Howie and I wrote about the infuriating roadblock thrown up by the worthless scum of the Senate Republican conference against the nomination to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals of Caitlin Halligan, on the pretext that she might have some sympathy for gun-sales limitations. By that standard, of course, riffraff like Smirkin' John Roberts and Sammy the Hammer Alito would have been sent packing after about two minutes' research into their records, with the abundant indications that they consider the Constitution merely scratchy old toilet paper.

It seemed pretty clear after the last time the Senate Republican cabal filled its buster that the Halligan nomination was doomed, and that the neanderthals aren't likely to approve any nomination to the important D.C. Circuit unless it's someone on their level of depravity.

White House withdraws Caitlin Halligan nomination
Posted by Rachel Weiner on March 22, 2013 at 4:06 pm

The White House has withdrawn the nomination of Caitlin Halligan to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, weeks after Republicans filibustered a vote on her nomination for the second time.

Halligan requested that President Obama withdraw her nomination.

"I am deeply grateful to you for your confidence in me, and your steadfast support of my nomination," she wrote in a letter to the president. "After much reflection, I believe that the time has come for me to respectfully ask that you withdraw my pending nomination from further consideration by the United States Senate." . . .

Back in the days when "Chimpy the Prez" Bush was flooding the Senate with judicial nominations of life forms that seemed to have turned back the tides of evolution, right-wing scumbags screeched and wailed about the right of each of these toxic dumps to "an up-or-down vote." Once it was a Democratic president making the nominations -- and nominating such inoffensive moderates that they could have been appointed by a sane Republican president, if we happened ever to have such a beast -- we learned that the screechers and wailers were, more than anything else, lying liars, to borrow Al Franken's essential phrase.

An up-or-down vote was exactly what the Senate Republican scumbags devoted all their energies to preventing, knowing that the eminently qualified Halligan would easily win confirmation. And so once again the vile right-wing pond scum made sure everyone knows that it's the slime brigade that runs the show.

For the record, President Obama had this to say:

This unjustified filibuster obstructed the majority of Senators from expressing their support. I am confident that with Caitlin's impressive qualifications and reputation, she would have served with distinction. The D.C. Circuit is considered the Nation's second-highest court, but it now has more vacancies than any other circuit court. This is unacceptable. I remain committed to filling these vacancies, to ensure equal and timely access to justice for all Americans.

As usual, there is no price to pay for the America-hating, Constitution-shredding slimebrains. My fantasy is to see a campaign launched whereby voters in their home states are flooded with information about who and what they are, to the point where everywhere they go they are treated like pariahs until, one by one, each acknowledges his worthlessness and appears before live TV cameras brandishing the preferred Second Amendment prize of his choice and, as they say, eats it.

First in line, surely, should be Alabama [not Mississippi, of course -- thanks, Phil!] moron Jeff Sessions. The notion that a creature like that even has a voice in judicial appointments -- or any other matter of serious public concern -- is creepy beyond measure.

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Once again, a solid Senate majority isn't enough to confirm a judge. Plus, George Will tells Watergate tall tales

Really, you think that, just because Caitlin Halligan has a solid Senate majority wanting to vote to confirm her nomination to the DC Circuit Court, she should be confirmed? Where have you been?

"I don't think any reasonable person would find anything about Caitlin Halligan that would constitute 'extraordinary circumstances. The idea that a position that you took as a public official on behalf of your client amounts to an extraordinary circumstance was pretty astonishing."

-- White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler,
to The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin

by Ken

Nevertheless, because the Right's view is that whatever it can get away with is all right, and obstruction is one of the most reliable things it can bet away with, it appears that Caitlin Halligan's nomination to the DC Circuit Court, generally regarded as the second most influential court in the country behind only the U.S. Supreme Court itself, can't go forward. Not because she couldn't command a comfortable Senate majority for her nomination, but because last week -- "on the same day as Rand Paul's celebrated filibuster against drone strikes last week," as Jeffrey Toobin points out in a newyorker.com blogpost, "For Obama's Judges, It's Already Late" -- Senate Republicans marshaled 41 votes in opposition to bringing Halligan's nomination to the floor for a vote.

The modern-day Senate requirement that anything opposed by right-wingers requires 60 votes in the Senate, says Toobin, "has taken an enormous toll on President Obama's judicial appointments."

This was the second time that Halligan received majority support, but, because she never passed the threshold of sixty, her nomination now appears doomed. And so, in the fifth year of his Presidency, Obama has failed to place even a single judge on the D.C. Circuit, considered the second most important court in the nation, as it deals with cases of national importance. (Its judges -- like John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg -- also often wind up on the Supreme Court.) The D.C. Circuit now has four vacancies out of eleven seats.

"Halligan is impeccably qualified to be a judge," Toobin writes.

[S]he's a career government lawyer from New York -- and she enjoyed broad support among members of both parties in the legal community. Opposition to her focused almost completely on a single brief she wrote for her boss, then-New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo had sought to make gun manufacturers legally responsible for some of the violence in New York, a position that the National Rifle Association opposed. The N.R.A. punished Halligan for doing her job for New York, and the Senate Republicans followed.

The business about "extraordinary circumstances" referred to by White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler in the quote atop this post relates to the supposed bipartisan "truce" on Senate confirmation of judicial nominees dating back to 2005. Toobin again:

During the last Bush Administration, Republican Senators grew so frustrated with what they called Democratic obstruction of judicial nominees that they threatened to change Senate rules to limit filibusters on judges. In 2005, the bipartisan "Gang of Fourteen" Senators announced a truce. Democrats agreed to allow votes on Bush's nominees in "all but extraordinary circumstances," and they kept to the deal. Bush's second-term appointees (including two to the Supreme Court) proceeded without obstruction. At least technically, the Gang of Fourteen compromise is still in effect. But Republicans have essentially ignored it -- as the Halligan filibuster demonstrated.

(And let's not forget the point made recently by The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg that the transformation of the filibuster into a 60-vote requirement in the Senate is flatly unconstitutional.)

Of course the life forms Chimpy the Prez was stuffing into the federal judiciary, who were human only in the most technical biological sense, were appointed for either their unrelenting hostility to the Constitution or their screaming ignorance -- or, of course, wherever possible, both. They were appointed for the purpose of subverting and perverting constitutiona law and decency. They should, by and large, have been housed in quarantine cages.

Howie and I have written a fair amount about the Senate Republicans' policy of judicial obstruction; Jeffrey Toobin has written a lot about it. "Judicial appointments," Toobin writes, "represent one of the great missed opportunities of the Obama Presidency."

In his first term, especially in the first two years, Obama himself bore much of the blame for this. When Democrats controlled sixty Senate seats, Obama was slow to nominate lower-court judges, and his moment of greatest leverage passed. But, since the 2010 midterm elections, Republicans have been at fault, almost entirely. Most nominees are not formally stopped, as Halligan was, but rather are delayed and delayed. Bush's nominees got votes within weeks; Obama's take months, even for uncontroversial selections. William Kayatta, Jr., nominated to the First Circuit, waited three hundred days for a vote and then received eighty-eight votes for confirmation. Republicans delay because they can. "The Republican Senators are not punished for it, and they are rewarded by their base," a senior administration official said.

We all know perfectly well that the next time we have a Republican president, a stream of genetic mutants will be blasted from the White House to the Senate for confirmation to all the positions that require Senate approval, and the moment any word of oppposition is heard, the Great Right-Wing Noise Machine will be ratcheted up to deafening level about the nefariousness of the opposition to our constitutional system. And they won't just make noise; they'll enforce their will. If it means what they themselves called "the nuclear option," which is to say decommissioning the filibuster, I think it's safe to say they'll do it.

There is, we have to bear in mind, nothing remotely symmetrical about our current political spectrum. All tactics on the Right are deemed legitimate and appropriate, without even the most minimal obligation to reality or truth, thanks to the right-wing Right to Lie. And against that, what tools are left for a fight?

Toobin asks the obvious question: "What, if anything, can Obama do?"

Given the rules of the Senate, probably not much. (Earlier this year, Senate Democrats backed away from imposing limits on filibusters.) Because the Senate schedule operates by unanimous consent, Republicans must agree to take votes on judicial nominees, and they have been slow and stingy in doing so, even when they have no plans to filibuster or even to vote no. For example, eighteen district court nominees, all uncontroversial, are currently awaiting votes on the floor. All will be confirmed eventually, but Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, parcels out agreements to take votes just one or two judges at a time. "We are not hearing any opposition to the district court nominees," Ruemmler said. "The process is just too slow."

Obama himself, a former teacher of constitutional law, has said little about judicial nominees during his Presidency. (Given the way Republicans feel about him, Obama might just inflame the issue further if he spoke out.) So Ruemmler and the small group of people committed to the issue in the Administration will continue their strategy of filling the pipeline with nominees and hoping for votes. In the new few weeks, Sri Srinivasan, a deputy solicitor general, will have his Senate Judiciary Committee hearing for his nomination to the D.C. Circuit. Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, will soon attempt to get a vote for Patty Shwartz, a nominee for the Third Circuit. It's still early in Obama's second term, but, given the pace at which judicial nominations proceed, it's actually already pretty late.

SPEAKING OF THE RIGHT-WING RIGHT TO LIE

If you haven't already, you have to read "Revisionist history on Watergate," the blistering reply by Richard Ben-Veniste in today's Washington Post to an astonishing fabrication by infamous WaPo fabricator George Will. In Will's stupefyingly dishonest retelling, the hero of Watergate turns out to be none other than then-Solicitor General Robert Bork, No. 3 man in the Nixon Justice Department, who at the president's behest performed the flagrantly illegal act that two decent men, the attorney general and deputy attorney general, quit rather than do.

At the time of the Watergate scandals Ben-Veniste was chief of the Watergate Task Force of the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s Office, and he begs to differ.

Will's acceptance of Robert Bork’s self-serving claim to have been the "protector" of the Watergate investigation is a mischaracterization of history. Bork, then Nixon's solicitor general, famously carried out the president's order to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox after Attorney General Eliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus [right] refused in what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre.

Bork's assertion that by firing Cox he acted to protect the ongoing investigation of Watergate crimes is akin to the Army major's claim during the Vietnam War that "it became necessary to destroy the town to save it." Secret recordings reveal that well before the controversy surrounding the subpoenaed White House tapes, Nixon discussed with his chief of staff, Alexander Haig, his intention to fire Cox. This was part and parcel of the president’s continuing effort to obstruct the Watergate investigation.

Bork, recently arrived from the Yale Law School faculty, lent his academic credibility to the attempt to justify the firing -- which federal judge Gerhard Gesell later ruled was plainly illegal, as Cox could be fired only for "extraordinary impropriety." (Bork later stipulated that Cox had committed no such impropriety.) The grateful president, Bork recently wrote, promised to nominate him to the Supreme Court upon the next vacancy. . . .

Oh, there's more, and you should read it all, but for our immediate purposes this should be enough to make the point. Really now, allowing a man who built his career on the commission of a crime ordered by a career criminal who then reward him with a nomination to the Supreme Court -- well, really! Surely there are limits!

Well, as I was musing recently, when it comes to right-wing deception, we still haven't found out what, if any, those limits might be. (As I wrote in February 2012 in connection with Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell's tightrope walk: "Being a rising right-wing pol means finding that line between the merely preposterous and the too-preposterous.")

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