It seems clear that Senate Republicans are prepared to take the partisan war over the courts into uncharted territory -- delaying up-or-down votes on the Senate floor for even the most qualified and uncontroversial of the president's judicial nominees.... Over the past several decades, senators in both parties have used an escalating set of procedural tactics to block confirmations, particularly near the end of an out-going president's term in office. To date, however, the tit-for-tat game has played out within a fairly narrow category of nominees who are deemed controversial. While there has never been an agreed-upon definition of what that means -- it's an eye-of-the-beholder type of thing -- there has consistently been a large category of nominees that are not considered controversial.
Despite all this, Senate Republicans still won't give Obama's judges a vote. The three Obama judges confirmed to the lower courts -- Gerald Lynch from New York and Jeffrey Viken from South Dakota in addition to Lange -- each spent weeks pending on the Senate floor and endured a confirmation process that lasted more than three months. Two additional nominees, Andre Davis of Maryland and David Hamilton of Indiana, cleared the Senate judiciary committee way back on June 4 -- 144 days ago. Yet their floor votes are still pending.
Davis and Hamilton have spent longer in this particular form of limbo than any Bush nominee confirmed from 2007-08.
Steve Benen (who we can thank for the quote above) notes that this obstructionism isn't limited to potential judges. "HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, pointing to the difficulties of responding to the global flu pandemic, recently noted that the Senate isn't allowed to vote on a surgeon general, because Republicans refuse to let Regina Benjamin's nomination come to the floor. 'We are facing a major pandemic, we have a well-qualified candidate for surgeon general, she's been through the committee process. We just need a vote in the Senate," Sebeilus said late last week. 'Please give us a surgeon general.'"
The Republican strategy is to oppose everything. It doesn't make any difference what it is. The next time someone talks about "bipartisanship," you have my permission to grab them by the shoulders, shake them, and shout, "What the hell is wrong with your head?!?" Republicans have ruled out bipartisanship and -- if Democrats have any brains at all -- they should realize that this gives them permission to completely disregard their objections. In a world where people actually engaged their brains, this would be the Republican party completely neutering itself on everything.
But, of course, we don't live in that world. We live in a world where -- for some unexplained and unexplainable reason -- we have to pretend that Republicans as a whole are rational.
