bounty44
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quote:
ORIGINAL: MasterJaguar01
And to bounty's ridiculous (I mean that in the truest sense of the word) post.... "Advice and Consent" refers to the nomination and choice of nominees. It was never intended for one party to play politics with the process.
ridiculous?
what seems "ridiculous" to me is your presumption that you know what "advise and consent" means more than the people whose job it is to know. so given the choice between believing you understand it as compared to the very people involved in the process, im going with the latter.
at the same time, im going to go with this:
quote:
As Adam White has written extensively in The Weekly Standard and a Harvard Journal for the Study of Law & Public Policy article, this does not mean the Senate must act in any way on a nomination. “But nowhere does the Constitution say that the Senate is required to act on the president's nominations. The Framers certainly didn't understand the Senate to bear such an obligation. And the Framers who drafted that document certainly didn't say that the Senate bore such an obligation.”
Having studied the discourse of our Founding Fathers at the Constitutional Convention and the debates surrounding the Constitution’s ratification, White “found no indication of any expectation that the Senate would be required [to] vote on a President's nominees.”
He writes:
quote:
The Framers expressly based the Constitution's "advice and consent" model on the approach used in Massachusetts, under the State's Constitution of 1780. And, looking through years of archived nomination files, I found myriad examples of nominations made by the governor that received no up-or-down vote from the "Privy Council," the body that provided constitutional advice and consent.
But the best evidence of the Senate's power not to vote on nominations is found in the Framers' rejection of an alternative approach to appointments. As an alternative to the "advice and consent" model, James Madison proposed a discretionary Senate veto. Under that plan, a president's nominees would automatically be appointed unless the Senate mustered a majority vote against that nomination within a fixed number of days.
In short, Madison would have put the burden on the Senate, to affirmatively act to block a nomination. But the Framers rejected his proposal, and chose instead the "advice and consent" model, placing the burden on the president (and his supporters) to convince the Senate to confirm his nominee.
The Congressional Research Service provides further statistics on the Senate confirmation process:
quote:
From the appointment of the first Justices in 1789 through its consideration of nominee Elena Kagan in 2010, the Senate has confirmed 124 Supreme Court nominations out of 160 received. Of the 36 nominations which were not confirmed, 11 were rejected outright in roll-call votes by the Senate, while nearly all of the rest, in the face of substantial committee or Senate opposition to the nominee or the President, were withdrawn by the President, or were postponed, tabled, or never voted on by the Senate.
This means that 25 of the 36 failed nominations did not receive an up-or-down vote on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
As Senate Majority Leader McConnell and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Grassley point out in an op-ed in The Washington Post today, Minority Leader Harry Reid sang a very different tune when a Republican was in the White House.
quote:
The duties of the United States Senate are set forth in the Constitution of the United States. Nowhere in that document does it say the Senate has a duty to give presidential nominees a vote. It says appointments shall be made with the advice and consent of the Senate. That’s very different than saying every nominee receives a vote. The Senate is not a rubber stamp for the executive branch.
[mind you---that was harry reid saying that]
http://aclj.org/supreme-court/the-constitution-is-clear-the-senates-advice-and-consent-is-not-a-rubber-stamp-of-the-president
and im also going to trust jay sekulow, a constitutional lawyer who runs the American center for law and justice, knows a bit more about it than you do also.
so it seems to me, your argument is less with my "ridiculous" assertion, and more with history, the constitutional scholars who understand it, and the senators who live it.
< Message edited by bounty44 -- 3/20/2016 8:28:45 AM >
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