Thilli$: Judges? (Ain’t my job, man.)
Oh, the leftists are having a field day with our junior senator’s latest battle with coherence and articulation:
Republicans have never made it easy for President Barack Obama to confirm judges. But Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) came up with a new reason the Senate shouldn’t be filling empty court seats: It’s not our job.
Democrats including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Mazie Hirono (Hawaii) made repeated requests Wednesday to confirm a batch of Obama’s judicial nominees who are ready for votes. Each time they tried, Tillis objected and suggested the Senate shouldn’t be spending time on judges.
“What we get are things that have nothing to do with doing our jobs,” he said. “I’m doing my job today and objecting to these measures so we can actually get back to pressing matters.”
It’s a weird thing to say since it is literally the Senate’s job to confirm judges, as spelled out in the Constitution. It’s also ironic that Tillis is the one saying this, given that he’s overseeing the longest federal court vacancy in the country. There’s beenan empty seat on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina for 3,848 days, or 10.5 years.
Democrats seemed perplexed by Tillis’ rationale.
“I’m not sure what version of the Constitution you’re reading that doesn’t say confirming judges is part of your job in the United States Senate,” Warren said.
“Of course confirming judges is part of the Senate’s job,” Hirono said. “In fact, only the Senate can do that.”
Tillis spokesman Daniel Keylin later declined to clarify to HuffPost why Tillis said it isn’t the Senate’s job to confirm judges. Instead, he criticized Democrats for “refusing to do their jobs” by using Senate floor time to request votes on judges when Republicans wanted to debate bills relating to veterans and troops.[…]
Are Thilli$ and Burr engaged in some personal contest to see who can give their press flack a stroke FIRST ???
It’s interesting how leftists have suddenly developed an interest in following The Constitution to the letter. Let’s see what that document actually says about the duties of the Senate:
[…] From its earliest years, the Senate has jealously guarded its power to review and approve or reject presidential appointees to executive and judicial branch posts.
In its history, the Senate has confirmed 123 Supreme Court nominations and well over 500 Cabinet nominations.
In the 19th century, the Senate referred few nominations to committees. Since the mid-20th century, committee referral has become routine and most nominees testify at Senate hearings.
The United States Constitution provides that the president “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, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for…” (Article II, section 2). This provision, like many others in the Constitution, was born of compromise, and, over the more than two centuries since its adoption, has inspired widely varying interpretations.
The president nominates all federal judges in the judicial branch and specified officers in cabinet-level departments, independent agencies, the military services, the Foreign Service and uniformed civilian services, as well as U.S. attorneys and U.S. marshals. In recent years, more than 300 positions in 14 cabinet agencies and more than 100 positions in independent and other agencies have been subject to presidential appointment. Approximately 4,000 civilian and 65,000 military nominations are submitted to the Senate during each two-year session of Congress. The vast majority are routinely confirmed, while a very small but sometimes highly visible number fail to receive action.
The importance of the position, the qualifications of the nominee, and the prevailing political climate influence the character of the Senate’s response to each nomination.Views of the Senate’s “proper role” range from a narrow construction that the Senate is obligated to confirm unless the nominee is manifestly lacking in character and competence, to a broad interpretation that accords the Senate power to reject for any reason a majority of its members deems appropriate. Just as the president is not required to explain why he selected a particular nominee, neither is the Senate obligated to give reasons for rejecting a nominee.[…]
Thilli$ is right — in a way. The Senate is not required to confirm a president’s nominees. The process laid out in The Constitution says the nominees need to be run before 
the Senate for review and possible approval.
The hypocrisy alarms are screaming over this one. The Democrats were notorious — with a Republican president and a Democrat Senate majority — for throwing monkey wrench after monkey wrench into the confirmation process. They ran GOP nominees repeatedly through the slander machine — beating them up terribly. Some threw up their hands and quit, while others stuck out the confirmation process and limped into their new roles.
Why should a majority break their neck to confirm a bunch of nominees from a lame duck president when their party’s nominee has a great shot at taking The White House in less than a year?
Though, it is hard to be taken seriously when you rushed through a radical Obama pick for Librarian of Congress days before taking THIS stand.
“Why should a majority break their neck to confirm a bunch of nominees from a lame duck president when their party’s nominee has a great shot at taking The White House in less than a year? ”
This is what Tilli$ should have said. But that would have required thinking.
…and a wild imagination.
Or just imagination period.
I wonder how Thom is coming with defunding Obama Care. You know the law which he funded?
Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn every now and then. Tillis has finally figured out that Republicans need to stop these radical Obama judicial appointments like the Democrats put a stop to Bush appointments at the end of his term. With Obama, this should have happened a long time ago, but I guess we can say, better late than never.
The confirmation process of all Obama appointees to any office should have been brought to a screeching halt years ago until Obama stopped using dictatorial executive orders to go around Congress, but Mitch McConnell and the Senate GOP leadership have never had the backbone to really lead and they just enable Obama instead. Extremely poor leadership in both the House and Senate has rendered the GOP majorities ineffective.
Finally, in the last six months of his reign, we finally get our Republicans bringing a halt to Obama packing the federal judiciary with leftwing radicals. It should have been done a long time ago.
We also have to remember that Richard Burr not only voted for Obama leftist radicals to be judges, he endorsed and promoted them, as he did for the radical Obama judge who was the swing vote to throw out our Congressional districts and ordered homosexual marriage in NC. Burr is a special kind of stupid.
Republicans need to stop these radical Obama judicial appointments
“Radical”? Funny how Brant managed to leave this line out from that story:
“At least 24 judicial nominees are ready for votes. None are controversial, and all have bipartisan support. In fact, 23 of them were confirmed unanimously by the Judiciary Committee, of which Tillis is a member.”
“Radical”? When the GOP-controlled Judiciary (including Tillis) unanimously confirmed them? Give me a break. These judges have to be as middle-of-the-road moderate as you can get.This is just ‘Screw Obama’ vindictiveness, and it means federal benches will sit empty, the judges we have will get worn out, and citizens won’t have their cases heard for years if ever. Who needs justice, when you have petty partisanship, right?
Excellent summation.
Actually, if Barry nominated them the first requirement would be that they are a whacko progressive radical. Just because they are passing a committee does not mean they are middle of the road. If anything that means the committee is too liberal.
I wish to applaud Senator Tillis for stopping these left wing judges from being approved. I hope Senators Burr and Tillis they will continue to keep the NC seat vacant until we can get a Republican nominee.
“Left wing judges”? Did you read the post above? Almost all of these judges were confirmed unanimously by the GOP-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee. How middle-of-the-road do you have to be to get unanimous approval in this partisan climate?
Anyone who says this is about ‘left wing’ this, or ‘left wing’ that, is either lying to themselves or is ignorant of the facts.
Mitch McConnell wants to ”govern”, to use a term the media has given him, and translated, that means kowtow to Obama. All you have to do is look at the radical rulings we have coming out of judges who are legislating from the bench to see how radical they are. McConnell is a disgusting joke and he is primarily why the GOP Senate is being such disgusting wimps. Voters did not elect a GOP majority because we wanted Congress to rubberstamp Obama’s leftwing policies. We elected a Republican Congress to stop Obama and they are cowardly refusing to do it. Ted Cruz hit the nail on the head when he called Mitch McConnell ”the best Senate leader the Democrats have ever had”.
So no response to the fact that two dozen of these pending “radical” judges passed the Judiciary Committee unanimously? So that makes these GOP Senators Obama-sympathizers?
Chuck Grassley, Iowa, Chair
Orrin Hatch, Utah
Jeff Sessions, Alabama
Lindsey Graham, South Carolina
John Cornyn, Texas
Mike Lee, Utah
Ted Cruz, Texas
Jeff Flake, Arizona
David Vitter, Louisiana
David Perdue, Georgia
Thom Tillis, North Carolina
With all due respect, if you really think of those 11 guys as “leftwing”, you need to get a better sense of where the middle is.
Now you got it. These guys willing to kowtow to Barry is the problem. At this point in the BHO regime the best thing is for the Senate to ignore any of his radical judges. This is proven by things like the recent decisions to allow middle school boys in girls restrooms/locker rooms because they “feel” like girls.
I wish to applaud Senator Tillis for stopping these left wing judges from being approved. I hope Senators Burr and Tillis will continue to keep the NC seat vacant until we can get a Republican nominee.
Better late than never. Once Obama went rogue with his executive orders to bypass Congress in a dictatorial manner, if we had had real leadership in the Senate, they would have shut down every confirmation of every Obama appointment in the Senate until he reversed the executive orders. Conservatives proposed doing just that, but McConnell the Coward refused.
Joe Nicole – why do you think that government can work without some compromise? I am concerned about how polarized we are becoming. This country was not built on politicians all being pig-headed and stubborn all the time. It seems like our legislators are getting more extremist and unreasonable every year. We are about evenly split between republican and democrat voters. How can our country work without some give-and-take? Not filling jobs that have been empty for 10 years cannot possibly be the answer.