The Reid Political Cowardice

The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy!

H. L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy, 1926

{ed. note: in observance of the Thanksgiving holiday, there will be no post next week. We will return in two weeks. Happy Thanksgiving & Happy Hanukkah to all}

Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader of the Senate, and with the duplicity of a sufficient number of Democratic Senators, consciously chose to pervert the United States Constitution this week, acting on nothing more than political expediency and politicalcowardice.

The cynical and short sighted decision by Reid to change the filibuster rules in the Senate from a 60 vote requirement to a simple majority was not, as so many pundits incorrectly asserted, a question of constitutionality.

The rules of the Senate are just that – the rules of the Senate.

What Reid did do, at the bidding and behest of President Obama, was to disregard the wisdom and intent of the framers and the founders of the United States Constitution.

The matter all arose due to the Republican minority choosing to block judicial appointments on the belief that the intended appointees were too liberal.

The question of whether such choices are either right or wrong is not the issue at hand; such actions are their right and responsibility under Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution.

Consider the relevant excerpt from that august document:

“He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States…”

The key words here are ‘advice and consent’.

What Reid and the President have done is to remove the advice part and gone right to the rubber stamp of a simple majority consent.

The ability to change the rules of the Senate on such a political whim means that should the recalcitrant Republicans choose to impede any legislative actions requested by the president, the cowardly Reid can change the rules again to assure passage of the bill at hand.

The choice to enact the so-called ‘nuclear option’ is not a new gambit – indeed the Republicans threatened to do the same thing during the administration of President Bush.

Of course, at that time, a freshman senator named Barack Obama rose to speak on the floor of the senate to warn that such actions would be the ‘tyranny of the majority’.

At the same time, then minority leader Reis called such proposals to be ‘un-American’.

And hypocrisy reigns freely from Washington.

The reasons Reid chose to change the rules centered on judicial appointments.

The President is a democrat – the Senate is led by a majority of Democrats. They are now free to appoint people to the judiciary that agree with and have shown a proclivity to imposing liberal legislation from the bench.

In short, the President is attempting to control the executive, legislative and judiciary branches of government under a single individual –himself.

The namesake of this blog, James Madison, had an opinion on such attempts, and his wisdom speaks to the nation he helped found over 200 years later:

To wit:

“The accumulation of all powers, Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”