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R Republicans are wisely considering changing the rules of the Senate to speed up the confirmation of the nomination for the presidency. But this initiative should only be the beginning of efforts to overcome unprecedented democratic obstructionism.
Of almost all of the presidential candidates nominated by President Trump, as well as many of his appointments to the executive, the Democrats call for the 30 hours of debate allowed (after the close) to be authorized, even if they have no real objection to make. candidate himself. The time required to confirm each candidate has reached a level never reached before and the number of vacancies in the judiciary has increased considerably.
The situation is even worse when it comes to executive positions. A president should surely be allowed to endow his own administration with any person who can pass a confirmation vote. Yet the blockade of Democratic senators is so severe that about 374 candidates were never voted at the last Congress (against only 176 uncompleted nominations at the end of President Barack Obama's first biennium).
As a result, some Republicans are calling for a rule change that would reduce debate time for most candidates from 30 hours to eight or even two. This would reflect a less formal Obama presidential agreement that Republicans allowed Obama-nominated candidates to run after just eight hours of debate.
Republicans might try to change the time of the debate by formally amending the bipartite rules and by forcing 60 out of 100 senators to accept this change. If that does not work, they say that they can do it with only 50 votes (plus Vice President Mike Pence) via a new interpretation of the rules setting a precedent – a process known as the "Nuclear option".
Face to face with an obstructionism based not on substance but on pure discord and the game of political power, the Republicans would be quite right to change the rule of debate. But they could have already begun to use other potential weapons – options arguably even more in keeping with the spirit of current rules and traditions than a newly restricted limit to debate.
First, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Has probably already asked the White House to resubmit all expired appointments, letting them know that he wanted to speed them up. The White House should quickly oblige.
Then, the first option, more complicated, but not requiring any modification of the rules or reinterpretation, would be to use the so-called "rule of two speeches" to exhaust the obstructionist Democrats by demanding that they actually use the time of debate that 'they have chosen. to pretend to want. The details are somewhat abstruse, but suffice it to say that this option would not be guaranteed to solve the problem – Democrats could mobilize the energy needed to make their speeches run almost endlessly – but it's worth at least to be tried.
The second idea, more effective, would be entirely in the spirit of the existing rules. This would allow a floor vote for candidates nominated by the relevant committee at the previous convention, but who would never have had their day in the Senate.
Since the nominations themselves can only be approved with 51 votes after the debate time has elapsed, McConnell could say that they should be able to be brought to the same margin of 51 votes without requiring the deadline imposed by requiring a second visit to committees that have already reported them.
The mechanism would operate as follows:
By virtue of Rule XXXI of the Senate, all candidatures proposed by the President must be referred to a competent committee "unless otherwise decided". McConnell, or Pence, or any other person occupying all the Senate presidency at the time, could therefore command. Announcing that the nominations submitted again ( and not proposed for the first time) which have already received the approval of the commission at the last congress should not require a new approval, the president could present to the floor and close them immediately.
If the Democrats object, their objection will be voted by the entire Senate – and if the objection is rejected by a simple majority vote, the nomination will be made by the Senate. intermediary of this shortcut committee, sans .
While a complete change to the rules regarding the limits of debate would amount to a clear amendment to the letter and the spirit of the existing rules, this procedure would be clearly justifiable if the wording of the rules were used. existing ("unless otherwise specified"). Moreover, it could be described as a simple matter of logic, of administrative procedure, in the spirit of the Senate's current operations.
After all, 51 votes are already enough to call the candidates and appoint them and to confirm them once they have left the committee. It does not change that. Because former Democratic leader Harry Reid had "nuanced" the confirmation process to allow a threshold of 51 votes (instead of 60 votes), and because the complete records of these candidates had already been considered by a committee (although that the previous Congress), the majority of the Senate has the right and all the logical reasons to "decree" that any new action to delay in committee be avoided.
This would be an appropriate reaction to the obstructionism of Democrats, who once again made twice as many appointments as those that had been opened after the first two years of Obama. This would improve the effectiveness of the Senate, equity for candidates and service to the public, which relies on courts and executive agencies to handle cases and controversies with due diligence.
Progressives relying more and more on Liberal judges to defeat Trump's initiatives, they can not block the law, and some of these judges break tradition by issuing injunctions across the country rather than in their own jurisdiction, every day that passes is one day more lawsuits can be attributed to left-wing judges rather than recently-confirmed conservatives. The left wrongly uses judges to develop policies; Conservatives should speed up confirmations to restrict them.
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