Rove: US Will Rue 'Dictator' Reid's 'Nuclear Option'

[mystery-ak]

http://www.newsmax.com/PrintTemplate.aspx?nodeid=538198


Newsmax
Rove: US Will Rue 'Dictator' Reid's 'Nuclear Option'
Friday, November 22, 2013 03:26 PM

By: Wanda Carruthers

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid acted like a dictator in passing the "nuclear option" in a move the people of the United States will regret, Republican adviser Karl Rove said Friday.

"The country will rue the day that Harry Reid, in dictatorial fashion, changed the rules in the middle of the game, in a hypocritical gesture that he condemned when it was proposed in 2005," Rove, former deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, told Fox News' "Happening Now."

Democrats in the Senate on Thursday passed a measure, known as the "nuclear option," that allows a simple majority to approve executive branch and lower-court nominees.


Rove called the action "gross hypocrisy" and recalled that in 2005, Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., suggested the tactic at a time Republicans had a Senate majority. President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, both senators at that time, as well as Reid, roundly criticized the tactic.

The change will enable the majority party to pass votes more easily on an ideological basis, Rove said. He said the Senate was designed by the founding fathers to "make it tougher to put things through" by requiring a 2/3-majority vote.

"We're going to see them ramming through people who represent the ideological base of each political party on 51 votes. That is not going to be good for the country," Rove said.

"If this extends further ― the legislation — we will have lost . . . [what the] Senate was designed to be, to be protected a little bit from the passions of people," he said.

[olde north church]

If 2/3 was the intention, it should have been written.

[jmyrlefuller]

They also wrote that it was the states' responsibility to appoint senators. Yet they ripped that requirement out during the Wilson Progressive era.

I remember back in 2005 hearing all the GOP-e voices inside and outside the beltway yammering about how they wanted to get rid of the filibuster so that their nominees could get an up or down vote. I thought they were wrong then, and the Democrats (who were so keen on keeping the filibuster back then) are wrong now. What's worse is that the filibuster is especially important on issues in which the Senate chamber is the only arbiter (where the House has no say). The filibuster sets a higher standard for passing nominations and treaties so that the ruling party can't simply run roughshod over the rest. Without it, it's just a rubber-stamp, giving a President and his allies in the Senate the opportunity to pack the courts, who in turn have de facto power to declare law by edict.

Reid has oddly left the filibuster in place for legislation, where it is arguably less necessary, and ripped it out for nominations, where it is crucial. He didn't even change the rules to do it: he and his minions simply voted that they were going to ignore the rules.