Paul Revere by Cyrus Dallin, North End, Boston

~~~

~~~

Tuesday, October 13, 2020

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse was magnificent!

 

8 comments:

Shaw Kenawe said...

COURT PACKING?

Yeah. The Trumpublicans are vicious at it:

The Republicans refused to confirm more than 100 Obama appointed judges, including a Supreme Court nominee. They held them open until Trump and then began confirmed them at rapid speed. That is *literally* the definition of court-packing.

I have no problem with Biden expanding the Court. The original SCOTUS was SIX. We're the THIRD MOST POPULOUS country in the world. Adding more justices would be logical.

skudrunner said...

Ms Shaw, Filling a vacant seat is not court packing. We should have SCOTUS who are impartial but that never seems to be the case. Roberts and Kavanaugh seem to be better at it than the others. I find it amusing that a congressman would bring up dark money when the entire congress is run on dark money.

Ducky's here said...

Barrett look as if she just found out she's a corporate stooge.

Dave Miller said...

Skud... you've got no standing on this issue.

The anger of the Dems at this issue is not that a GOP pres nominated a conservative judge. It's that the GOP stiff armed a man they asked Obama to nominate earlier in his term, Merrick Garland. A man they said was the perfect example of a judge we should be putting on SCOTUS.

Then McConnell refused to even meet with him.

Then the GOP said this principle they dreamed up was honorable. Then they said yes it would apply to them. Then they said "take their word and hold them accountable" if they changed their minds if a seat came open in the last year if a "Trump Term." Which of course it did, and of course we learned that the word of the GOP, as we always knew it was, was BS.

The court, even with Barrett should be sitting at 5-4. The GOP, the party that before Obama's election, devised a strategy to deny him at every turn, that limited his ability to name even circuit judges, stole that seat. It's politics. I get it. But I don't have to like it.

Since Newt Gingrich, the GOP has been about amassing power as opposed to governing effectively, at least on a federal level. This is just more of the same.

Les Carpenter said...

If values and principles actually meant something to the GOP we would not be in the GD mess this nation finds itself today. As for democrats? They've had their own moments with manipulating values and principles to suit their immediate agenda. Albeit much less egregiously than rethuglicans.

skudrunner said...

Rev, I understand the frustration the democrats feel but as the prince said We Won. If the tables were turned the democrats would shove a liberal judge through in a minute. I remember one bill that passed without any support from the opposite party, no hearing and no information. As it turned out most of what was said about it was a lie. It was so egregious that the speaker said you cannot see it until you vote for it, similar to harris/biden on packing the court.

SCOTUS should be non political and non biased but that is in a different universe.

Shaw Kenawe said...

President Obama was in office when there were 230+ days left in his presidency and Moscow Mitch denied him his right to place a justice on the SCOTUS. Have you forgotten that bit of stealing?

Also, Pres. Obama placed 100+ names of judges to different courts and Moscow Mitch refused to have a vote in the Senate on any of them, so when Trump became president, Trump could fill those judicial seats deliberately left unfilled by Moscow Mitch.

The Trumpublican Party is now shoving through a thinly qualified judge to be on the SCOTUS with 20 days to the election and people already voting!

So.

If the Dems win and they wish to, I fully support increasing the number of seats on the SCOTUS.

As you and many other Trumpublicans have said: "Elections have consequences."

Trumpublicans have played hardball with the seating of judges for the courts. And if Biden wins, I expect the Dems to return the favor!

Dave Miller said...

Well Skud, once again you got your facts and history wrong. Here's what Senator Joni Ernst, the GOP Senator from Iowa said when she was presiding office of the Senate on the actual deliberation on the ACA, that somehow you say never happened...

“The Secretary of the Senate’s office notes that H.R. 3590 was considered on each of 25 consecutive days of session, and the Senate Library estimates approximately 169 hours in total consideration,” she said.

169 Hours!

If that seems like a lot, it's because only one other bill in Senate history has been debated for a longer time.

Here's some additional info for you...

FACT: The ACA had a historic number of hours of debate and amendments during Committee development of the legislations.

-The House process spanned three committees – Energy and Commerce, Ways and means, and Education and Labor – with dozens of hearings over many months.
-Specifically, the House held 79 bipartisan hearings and markups on the health reform bill over the period of an entire year.
-House members spent nearly 100 hours in hearings, heard from 181 witnesses from both sides of the aisle, considered 239 amendments (both Democratic and Republican), and accepted 121 amendments.

FACT: The Senate held dozens of public meetings and hearings in both the Finance and HELP Committees and accepted hundreds of Republican amendments.

-The HELP Committee held 14 bipartisan roundtables, 13 bipartisan hearings, and 20 bipartisan walkthroughs on health reform.
-The HELP Committee considered nearly 300 amendments and accepted more than 160 Republican amendments.
-The Finance Committee held 17 roundtables, summits, and hearings on health reform. The Finance Committee also held 13 member meetings and walkthroughs and 38 meetings and negotiations for a total of 53 meetings on health reform. [Senate Finance Committee, 5/3/10]
-The Finance Committee held a seven-day markup of the bill, the longest Finance Committee markup in 22 years, resulting in a bipartisan 14-to-9 vote to approve the bill. [Senate Finance Committee, 5/3/10]
-The Finance Committee markup resulted in 41 amendments to revise the bill, including 18 by unanimous consent or without objection. [Senate Finance Committee, 10/13/09]

FACT: The financing of the ACA’s coverage provisions was well known and debated.

When the bill came to the floor, the Senate spent 25 consecutive days in session on health reform, the second longest consecutive session in history. In total, the Senate spent more than 160 hours considering the health reform legislation.

-The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office issued many reports on the Affordable Care Act’s financing, clearly showing that revenue would be raised by the personal responsibility provision, also known at the individual mandate or free-rider penalty, in every case that it described the law’s coverage provisions. [CBO, 12/10; The Washington Post, 9/24/14; ASPE, 9/24/14]
-CBO also wrote extensively about how a properly-functioning insurance market would work as designed under the ACA. The entire purpose of insurance is to balance out the risk of healthy and non-healthy enrollees; anyone who believes that this point was avoided during debate of the ACA was simply not paying attention to advocates of the law as they described it during the many public hearings the law received.

Maybe the reason you persist in your views is because facts are challenging for you and the rest of your friends on the HMS Mothership. That's how it is I guess when you blindly support Mr $750.00 in Taxes.