{"id":9380,"date":"2006-12-19T09:45:36","date_gmt":"2006-12-19T14:45:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/9380.html"},"modified":"2006-12-19T09:45:36","modified_gmt":"2006-12-19T14:45:36","slug":"sam-brownbacks-obstructionism-the-final-chapter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/sam-brownbacks-obstructionism-the-final-chapter\/","title":{"rendered":"Sam Brownback’s obstructionism — the final chapter"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been following Sen. Sam Brownback’s (R-Kan.) obstructionist tactics of a Bush judicial nominee with great interest, in large part because it’s such a breathtaking example of Republican lunacy. I’m pleased to report that Brownback has finally dropped his objections, but not before one last ridiculous move.<\/p>\n

First, a little background. The president nominated Michigan Court of Appeals Judge Janet T. Neff to be a US District judge. Brownback — who, up until quite recently, insisted that every judicial nominee, without exception, deserves an up-or-down vote — learned that Neff was on hand for a public ceremony in which two lesbians pledged their commitment to one another in Massachusetts. (One of the women was the daughter of a family who had lived next door to Neff for 26 years.) It was not a marriage ceremony and, despite some rumors to the contrary, Judge Neff did not officiate.<\/p>\n

No matter. Brownback blocked her nomination from receiving an up-or-down vote, effectively arguing that being friends with a gay neighbor for more than two decades necessarily disqualifies<\/a> a person for the federal bench, even if you’re nominated by the Bush White House.<\/p>\n

Brownback now believes that he’ll probably vote against the Neff nomination, but he has finally agreed to allow a vote<\/a> on her nomination. But it’s worth noting that before Brownback graciously allowed the process to move forward, he proposed what he said was a compromise: he’d allow a floor vote on her nomination if Neff agreed to recuse herself from all cases involving same-sex unions. Brownback was blazing a new trail — no senator in American history had ever suggested that a nominee agree in advance to remove herself from deciding a whole category of cases.<\/p>\n

Charles Fried, a Harvard Law School professor and leading conservative scholar, said Mr. Brownback’s actions were improper. “First of all, people go to parties for all sorts of reasons,” Professor Fried said, and how one would rule on a case should not be inferred from that private activity.<\/p>\n

Further, he said, “It would be inappropriate for the judge to recuse herself from any such case because it is a judge’s duty to sit on cases” unless there is a clear conflict of interest…. “For her to agree to any such restriction in this case would be wrong,” said Professor Fried, who has been both a judge and the solicitor general of the United States.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Keep in mind, Brownback’s obstructionism wasn’t limited to just Neff.
\n
\nThe NYT reported that Neff’s nomination was “included in a package of more than a dozen nominees whose confirmation had been agreed upon by both Democrats and Republicans. Mr. Brownback’s objections held up the whole roster of nominees.”<\/p>\n

With this in mind, I’d like to remind my friends on the right about what baseless “obstructionism” is all about. Remember, no domestic issue has riled Republicans in the Senate more than judicial nominees. The fact that Senate Democrats would dare<\/i> to do exactly what they did when Clinton was president, and block some of the president’s more controversial would-be judges, was, as far as the Senate GOP was concerned, a genuine threat to democracy.<\/p>\n

Every<\/i> nominee, Republicans said, deserve an up-or-down vote. No exceptions could be tolerated without tearing at the fabric of our system of government. Senate Republicans felt so strongly about this that they were prepared to cheat<\/a> and re-write the chamber’s rules in order to prohibit judicial nominees from ever being blocked again.<\/p>\n

And yet, here’s Brownback, blocking more than a dozen<\/i> of the president’s judicial nominees — all of whom enjoy bi-partisan support — because one of them was friends with a gay neighbor.<\/p>\n

This breathtakingly stupid incident is worth remembering the next time Republican start whining about “obstructionism.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been following Sen. Sam Brownback’s (R-Kan.) obstructionist tactics of a Bush judicial nominee with great interest, in large part because it’s such a breathtaking example of Republican lunacy. I’m pleased to report that Brownback has finally dropped his objections, but not before one last ridiculous move. First, a little background. The president nominated Michigan […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9380\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}