After the Republican gains in last week’s election, right-wing activists immediately sent a letter to Senate Republicans urging them not to re-institute the 60-vote threshold for overriding filibusters against judicial nominees when they take control of the Senate in the next term, after Democrats eliminated it through the so-called “nuclear option” last year.
Among those who signed on to the letter was Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver, who discussed the importance of banning the use of the filibuster on today’s “Faith and Freedom” radio broadcast by asserting that doing so would somehow teach the Democrats a lesson by forcing President Obama to now nominate more moderate judicial candidates.
Staver and co-host Shawn Akers both seemed convinced that not re-instituting the 60-vote filibuster threshold would somehow constrain Obama for the remainder of his term and gloated as if this was sort of ironic comeuppance for the Democrats for having changed the rule.
“The Democrats wanted to hurt America by taking it away,” Staver said, “and putting in these radical nominees. Now they’re going to have the live with the medicine. They’re going to live with what they did. We shouldn’t re-institute it on these judges and this will help us block these radical judges. Obama is either gonna not be able to appoint anybody to the bench or he’s going to have to moderate and bring some people in that are not these radicals that he’s been putting on the benches across the country”:
Of course, the entire point of doing away with the filibuster was because Republicans, who were in the minority, had been using it to routinely block the Democratic majority in the Senate from confirming President Obama’s judicial nominees. They went so far as to use the filibuster to prevent President Obama from filling any vacancies on the critically important D.C. Circuit Court, and vowed to continue to do so regardless of who he nominated.
Next term, the Republicans will be in control of the Senate and will be able to block the confirmation of Obama’s judicial nominees simply by virtue of being the majority party. The likelihood of Democrats seeking to block any of President Obama’s judicial nominees is virtually nonexistent, so maintaining the ban on the use of the judicial filibuster will literally have no impact whatsoever.
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