Skip to main content

Advice & Consent of the Senate

There are a lot of comparisons between Trump's appointment of Amy Barrett and Obama's appointment of Merrick Garland. There is one HUGE difference that makes all the difference. The President's party is in control of the Senate at the time of the appointment.

People seem to not understand that the appointments to the Federal Judiciary are at the “Advice & Consent of the Senate”. The advice and consent of the Senate of the Garland appointment was “we will not approve him”. Although I thought at the time and still think now it would have been better to have the vote and the appointment be ended that way, it is well within the Senate’s purview to say “No” prior to the vote. It is forgotten that Garland would have not been approved in all likelihood even with the vote.

 The other point is this: the people have spoken and had input into the appointment of the next Supreme Court justice - in 2016 they voted in Donald Trump (I know that argument is somewhat negated by the fact that Obama was the duly elected president in 2016 - I accept that) The main “voice” of the people was voting in 2018 to leave the Senate with a Republican majority. Everyone that is politically savvy at all knows that the Senate confirms Presidential appointments. If they don’t realize they confirm most of them, they surely know they confirm the Supremes! The 2018 election was the chance for the “voice of the people” on any Trump appointments, just as the 2014 elections were for any Obama ones. If the Senate is of the same party/mind as the President as far as appointments go - then nominations will (and should imho) be approved right up until the next election.

Judge Barrett sits on the second highest court in the land in the Court of Appeals. She has been vetted by the Senate and approved for a lifetime Federal judgeship in 2017. She is eminently qualified to sit on the Supreme Court (as was Merrick Garland, btw - he just had the bad luck of being nominated by a lame duck President without the support of the Senate)  The Supreme Court has around 7,000 cases sent to them for review annually. They actually hear and rule on 100 - 150 of these. That means that @6,900 go back to the lower court, which in a lot of these cases is the Court of Appeals - where Judge Barrett has a seat. The Court of Appeals makes many, many more rulings than the Supremes with the same power of law. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Even more Questions

You may get this more if you read (or re-read) these older posts: "A Serious One" from 4/6/08 "Alphabet diseases" from 11/13/07 and "Questions" from 1/20/08 I am still trying to get answers to the Questions asked in the post above. I have not found any that are worthy of printing. I have come up with more questions: How does one handle seeing the continual decline of their spouse and not being able to do a thing about it? How do you take the inability of your 53 year old wife to get out of bed, or in and out of the shower unaided? How do you answer questions that beg not to be asked, like: will I see Bailey (our daughter, a rising senior)graduate; will Hannah (our granddaughter - almost 3) remember me; or will I see Landon (or grandson - 6 months) walk? How do you comfort your bride of 35+ years when she looks at you with tears streaming down her face? Most of all, how do you offer support and help when you are so damn mad at the world and the situa...
4 comments
Read more

Late Night (early morning?) Thoughts

I was laying there trying to go to sleep last night (without much success, as I have a toothache), and my mind was wandering. I don't know about your mind, but when mine wanders....whoa! (just look at some earlier posts) So, I was thinking about George Washington (what...you don't think about our founding fathers when you are lying there trying to go to sleep?) and how he was called "the Father of our Country". I further thought that there is not a "Mother of our Country" (unless Martha gets it by default, but I don't think so). Then I started thinking about "family" or relationship nicknames. This is to be a participatory blog. I want you all to write back with the ones you think of that I missed. Here are the ones I thought of (I was up quite a while with my tooth!): Father of our Country, the Founding Fathers, Uncle Sam, Mother Earth, Mother Nature, Mother of all battles (or bombs), a priest is called - Father, a Mother Superior runs a conv...
3 comments
Read more

Simple Pleasures

I am writing this on the morning of a departure. My wife and I are heading back home after the better part of a week in Florida. I had a business reason for coming, and with family here - she joined me. It is wonderful to see a daughter that we do not see nearly enough and to visit with a Mother/Mother-in-law as well. Yesterday between the day to day activities that must be done, I spent a large amount of time sitting in a lounge chair in a marvelous screened-in "porch" area of my Mother-in-Law's house. It was in the mid-70s to upper 70's while I was sitting, but with a fantastic cooling breeze most of the time, and a ceiling fan to fill in the lulls. The sky was a tropical blue with cottony clouds that cruised by with the lazy drift of a tube on a river. I was able to start and finish a novel yesterday by killing off the majority of it sitting in this splendor . I just wrote a comment on my sister's blog. This post is somewhat in response to myself for that com...
2 comments
Read more