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Originally Posted by lookout123
i'm not sure, but i thought that was how it worked. the president nominates, the senate confirms or denies based on qualifications.
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Maybe ideally, but in reality, you could put "whim" in instead of qualifications, for both sides - especially during and before Clinton, where all it took was one senator from the nominee's home state to nix a nomination, no questions asked. So no, there's no long and glorious tradition of up or down votes.
If your Nelson quote is accurate, then he's an idiot, as are the Republicans who don't bother to research the nominations and just support them because Bush made them. Because there are problems with the few judges that the Democrats are blocking, whether or not Nelson knows them - only ten out of over 200 nominations were blocked. One, Priscilla Owen, is so right wing that Alberto Gonzalez called her a judicial activist several times when they served together.
However, the particular reasons for the filibusters aren't as important in terms of the Star Wars/end of a republic/rise of an empire issue as is the method by which the Republicans are trying to block the filibusters. They are attempting to change the Senate rules in order to increase their party's control of government in the long term. Unfortunately for them, it takes a two-thirds vote to change Senate rules, so they are going to
bypass that rule in order to change another. Their bypass is to claim that judicial filibusters are
unconstitutional, which nobody believes but many are willing to pretend, thus bringing down the hurdle to 51 votes including Cheney. The Senate Parliamentarian ( ie, the guy whose job it is to interpret Senate rules ) says this is not legal, so they are ignoring him. All this to ensure that Bush gets a 100% nomination approval rate instead of 95%.