Yesterday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer agreed, for reasons nobody can quite make sense of, to a deal allowing the fast-track confirmation of a metric assload of federal judicial nominations in return for a sack of magic beans or maybe a promise to one day name a post office after John McCain, nobody knows. Schumer could have at least used Senate rules to delay the nominations as long as humanly possible, but instead, he caved, and now Donald Trump has even more of his Federalist Society-chosen rightwing assholes on the federal bench. And people are gunning for the head of Nancy Pelosi, who got things done, why exactly? CHUCK WE ARE AND HAVE BEEN OVER YOU.
The Twitter consensus seems to be that there was no brilliant deal-making here: Don't expect a surprise announcement that Mitch McConnell has agreed to anything Dems want -- no funding for Puerto Rico, no action on the 500+ children still separated from their parents, not even a glance at tightening up election security. Instead, it looks like Schumer looked at the cold equations of any confirmation fight -- 50 Republicans and 49 Democrats -- and conceded to some members' requests that they be allowed to head home for a full three-day weekend of campaigning for this fall's election. So hey, if Trump's going to get his nominees, may as well help some Democrats who think an extra weekend would pay off and just eat the shit sandwich that's in front of him.
That seems like a pretty craven choice, though. Harry Reid would have found a way to at least get some shit in Republicans' eyes, we think.
None of this looks particularly promising with the Republicans planning to steamroll through the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh so he can hand Donald Trump a Get-Out-Of-Testifying Free card. For fuckssake, this is no way for Dems to go against a Republican caucus that successfully blocked Barack Obama's nominees every. damn. time -- even when they were still in the minority. (Yes, yes, go ahead and yell at Reid for ending the filibuster to get some of Barry's nominations through, but obviously the Rs would have done that once they had Trump as president, and we'd have had even fewer Obama nominees on the bench.)
And of course, some of those red state Dems who are trying to save their asses by being bipartisan share some of the blame. On the seven Trump nominees confirmed yesterday, some got through with fewer than 50 Republican votes, as progressive writer Jonathan Cohn points out:
Excuse us, but hello, Democratic leadership? This is not how you do opposition! Dude, do you even whip?
We would really like to tie this up in a nice happy bow and congratulate Chuck Schumer for his brilliant deal that somehow got something better than three days of campaigning out of this -- like maybe a vote on protecting Robert Mueller and free unicorn rides for all the kids -- but frankly, we're just disgusted that Schumer appears to have folded more quickly than a dollar-store umbrella in a stiff breeze. Fuck you, Chuck.
Yeah, the unicorns probably would have turned out to be eldritch horrors resulting from a freak accident in a Monsanto lab anyway. Fuck it, what we have to do is win back the Senate, get a Majority Leader with a killer instinct, and stop this shit.
[ Bloomberg / Rewire / Common Dreams ]
https://youtu.be/aLs7xP-hCkk
https://uploads.disquscdn.c...