Snitched from my friend at Villainous Company: Let’s imagine that Republicans swept the 2012 elections and were now in control not merely of the House but of the presidency and the Senate, too. Now let’s take it one step further and say that by using the filibuster the Democratic minority in the Senate had successfully blocked President Romney’s appointments to federal district and appellate court judgeships. What if, faced with this Democratic intransigence, the conservative Federalist Society helped devise a strategy to revamp Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster so that judicial nominees could be confirmed by a simple majority instead of the 60 votes required to overcome a filibuster? The elimination of the filibuster has allowed President Romney to appoint three judges to the critically important United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit, establishing a decisive 7 to 4 conservative majority on that bench. What’s more, two of the the three judges newly appointed by President Romney are members of the Federalist Society and the new conservative majority on the D.C. Circuit is now positioned to rule Obamacare unconstitutional. The Koch brothers — recall we are still in an alt-hypothetical universe — reward the Federalist Society by directing 100 loyal billionaires to contribute to the group. Would these developments provoke liberal outrage? They certainly would. But it’s not only the right that uses secretive organizations to keep rich donors anonymous while it seeks to influence elections and policy. Liberals do the same, and the press in large part gives them a pass. As you no doubt realized while you were reading, the hypothetical described above did not take place, but something approximating it did. Instead of Republican offenders, the players were President Obama, a Democratic Senate, the progressive American Constitution Society, and the Democracy Alliance, a network of very wealthy liberal donors. Visit the blog: villainouscompany/vcblog/
Posted on: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 01:36:04 +0000
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