Monday, April 11, 2016

OBAMA PLOTS ‘PLAN B’ FOR APPOINTING ‘JUSTICE’ GARLAND…


So I’m guessing that Barry might have picked up a few pointers from the Castro Boys during his recent stopover in Cuba.  You see since his efforts to pressure Senate Republicans to confirm Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court seem to be coming up empty, at least for now, liberal White House allies have become quite busy in floating a trial balloon of installing Garland on the Supreme Court without Senate confirmation.

All of the recent Democrat bluster about being able to break Republican resolve over Barry’s Supreme Court pick seem to have been, for the most part, all for naught. White House allies spent millions of dollars and made a full-court press for three weeks, which perennial Democrat asshole Chuckie Schumer had confidently claimed would break Senate Republicans and force confirmation of Garland.  So far the Republicans have manages to hold firm.

In fact, the Democrats’ efforts have fallen so flat that liberal newspapers have had no choice by to publish statements such as “Senate Republicans hold fast against Garland after two weeks of Democratic fury” (Washington Post), “On blocking SCOTUS pick, GOP estab’t & anti-estab’t conservative groups are united” (New York Times), “Prospects for Garland dwindle as two GOP senators revoke support for hearings,” (New York Times), “Meetings but no movement on Garland nomination,” (Roll Call).

However, that being said there has now been close to a dozen or so Republican senators who are either scheduled to have, or already have had, one-on-one meetings with Garland.  But with only two exceptions, these senators remain fully committed to not voting on the Supreme Court nominee and said they will explain that position to Garland during their meetings.  Frankly I’m rather shocked, I would have thought that many more would have already wilted under the pressure.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley is meeting with Garland for breakfast—for the sole purpose of explaining to the nominee face-to-face that Grassley will not hold a single hearing on his nomination or allow a committee vote, because Grassley has concluded that, pursuant to the Biden Rule first announced by Joe Biden in 1992, the next president should fill the seat left vacant by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death.

And it was Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who told Hugh Hewitt on radio that Grassley had been “the Rock of Gibraltar” on sticking to his position that, as chairman, Grassley would not schedule any hearings or votes on Barry’s nomination.  McConnell has said that he, too, will follow the Biden Rule, under which Supreme Court nominations made during a presidential election year should not be acted upon until after the election is over.  But history tells to watch out for McConnell.

Republican senators in tough reelection fights such as Rob Portman, Ron Johnson, Kelly Ayotte, Pat Toomey have all said they would privately meet with Garland, and explicitly affirmed, then reaffirmed, their support for Grassley’s decision not to have any committee hearings or votes, as well as McConnell’s decision not to allow any action on the Senate floor on Garland’s nomination.  But you can never trust that what is being said out in the open is what’s being said behind closed doors.

Even the most blatant of RINOs, Lindsay Graham, seems to have, at least thus far, held the line.  It was Graham’s spokesman, Kevin Bishop, who had stated in a public email that: “Senator Graham remains opposed to moving forward with the Garland nomination.”  And he went on to say, “He continues to believe the next president should pick the next nominee for the Supreme Court.”  But look, Graham hasn’t exactly got the reputation for having a spine.

And then, it was just last week that Barry returned to the University of Chicago where years ago he was a lecturer, and not a professor, as some outlets have been misreporting (Barry never published a single piece of legal scholarship, nor did he ever hold a tenure-track professorship). And it was there that he again lectured the law students, condemning Republicans’ refusal to vote on Garland’s nomination, alleging that “our democracy can’t afford that.”

Yet it would seem that back in 2005 and 2006 our democracy was, in fact, more than able to afford that as then-Senator Barry “Almighty” chose to filibuster President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees, including trying to keep the Senate from voting on the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito. The Senate finally confirmed Alito in January 2006, overcoming Barry’s efforts to block that confirmation vote.  But, as they say in politics, that was then and this is now.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) responded to Barry’s lecture last week, condemning Barry’s blatant hypocrisy with a press release entitled, “Obama’s Real Message Today: I Was a Phony Then, Not Now.”  Meanwhile, increasingly desperate to take control of the Scalia seat, Democrats are now resorting to some rather extreme, and rather unorthodox legal arguments to say the least.  Democrats can be quite creative when searching out ways to circumvent the Constitution.

The group Common Cause is what is frequently referred to as being a stridently liberal ‘advocacy’ group.  And it is one of its board members, some kook by the name of Gregory Diskant, who is now arguing that the Constitution empowers Barry to appoint Garland to the High Court without any vote in the U.S. Senate.  It’s amazing what liberals can find written between the lines when we have a Democrat in the White House that is nonexistent when a Republican is in the Oval Office.

So it is then that despite the fact that for the last 227 years, each of the 112 justices to serve on the Supreme Court—along with thousands of federal judges on the lower courts—was confirmed by a vote of the Senate as the exclusive means by which the Senate exercises its power of “advice and consent.”  But according to a Washington Post op-ed authored by Diskant, the Appointments Clause of the Constitution grants the president two separate powers, one to “nominate,” and the other to “appoint.”

So I’m guess he’s attempting to make the point here that such a vote is not really needed, that it’s nothing but a formality that we could easily live without.  Diskant claims that when the Senate does not vote up or down on a judicial nominee for a “reasonable amount of time,” which Diskant believes for some conveniently arbitrary reason to be 90 days, “It is altogether proper to view a decision by the Senate not to act as a waiver of its right to provide advice and consent.”

So long as the Senate was given a “reasonable opportunity to provide advice and consent,” Diskant argues that senators forfeit their constitutional power, allowing Barry to unilaterally appoint Garland to a lifetime position on the nation’s highest court.  Diskant assures readers that this tectonic shift in constitutional power “should not be viewed as a constitutional crisis,” and is instead merely a “healthy dispute between the president and the Senate about the meaning of the Constitution.”

Although such a thing has never once happened in the history of the United States, Diskant again assures readers that, “This kind of thing has happened before.” However he neglects to provide any relevant examples.  That would only be, of course, because there are no examples that can be provided, relevant or otherwise.  This guy is doing little more than grasping at straws out of what is nothing more than desire to slant the court sharply to the left for, what could be, decades.     

While it is plausible to regard his op-ed as the radical position of a single lawyer—who cleverly tries to mask this extreme argument by saying at the outset only that “it is possible to read” the Appointments Clause this way, not that it must be read this way—there is a serious possibility that he is floating a trial balloon for the White House, gauging the public’s willingness to accept such a fundamental change in the Constitution’s separation of powers and system of checks and balances.

It’s this argument that is strikingly similar to Barry’s argument regarding his own recess-appointment power. He argued before the Supreme Court he has power to fill vacancies during recesses of the Senate, including those for federal courts, any time there is not a sufficient number of senators on the Senate floor.  Going by Barry’s argument it’s on any night at 3AM, he could set his alarm to wake up, and fill any vacancy among senior executive-branch positions, or any federal court.

In NLRB v. Noel Canning, the Supreme Court in 2014 unanimously rejected Barry’s position with a 9-0 ruling. The Court held that the power to appoint is jointly held by the president and the Senate. Only the president can put forward a name, and only the Senate can install that nominee in office.  It would appear that Barry may once again be considering going that route yet again.  The lawlessness of this president would seem to know no bounds.

Let’s face it, if what we had now was a white guy trying to pull the type of maneuvers that we have seen coming for our first black president, he would likely have been impeached long ago.  But as we all know, along with Barry’s race comes a certain level immunity against such an act.  Frankly I’m sure if there’s anything that Barry could do that would earn for him what he so richly deserves.  Because you can't simply cannot impeach the first Black President, I thought everyone knew that.

It doesn’t matter how many laws he breaks, how bad of a job he does, or how many lies he tells, because he is the first black president he has the equivalent of a get out of jail free card. You have to learn that lying, stealing, and breaking laws are a cultural attribute, so punishing somebody for their culture is un-American. Even suggesting impeaching Barry should get the police investigating you and whatever career you have should be destroyed.

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