Slashdot Mirror
Senate Confirms Neil Gorsuch To Supreme Court (washingtonpost.com)
halfEvilTech quotes a report from Washington Post: The U.S. Senate confirmed Neil M. Gorsuch to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday. On a vote of 54 to 45, senators confirmed Gorsuch, 49, a Denver-based judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit. He will become the 113th person to serve on the Supreme Court and is scheduled to be sworn in Monday. Gorsuch's confirmation was the result of a rule change in the Senate. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell used the power of his position to change the rules of the Senate to lower the threshold on Supreme Court nominations to end debate from 60 to 51 votes. Therefore, "all presidential nominees for executive branch positions and the federal courts need only a simple majority vote to be confirmed by senators," reports Washington Post.
It is unclear as to what exactly Gorsuch's confirmation means for the tech industry. However, it is certain that Gorsuch will "face cases that demand a solid command of the complex issues digital technology raises, from copyright and privacy to intellectual property rights and data storage," writes Issie Lapowsky via Wired.
It is unclear as to what exactly Gorsuch's confirmation means for the tech industry. However, it is certain that Gorsuch will "face cases that demand a solid command of the complex issues digital technology raises, from copyright and privacy to intellectual property rights and data storage," writes Issie Lapowsky via Wired.
so much. Whatever else you think about Gorsuch's politics (and unless you own a large corporation they're awful) it's a fact the Republicans just stole that seat. It really angers me to see them doing so much wrong and getting away with it again and again...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The rule making this possible was introduced by the Democratic Party in 2013, also used first by them. Blaming the GOP for now taking advantage of this is kind of hypocritical.
on McConnell's part, regardless of how you feel about the outcome. Passing a left-leaning centrist with polling showing a Democrat in the White House and the Senate a toss-up, and the chance of a far more partisan left-leaning judge. I guess stopping everything that black guy tried to do was the primary objective.
Because the Republicans were keeping a nominee from being confirmed just like how they stole the seat from Garland.
Circuit Court Judges. Yet the Republicans passed the majority of nominees without any problem. You should at least consider the possibility that the few (it was more than one) being held up were of particular concern. Instead of changing nominees, as Schumer demanded the Republicans do, they changed the rules and packed courts with additional judges. (The DC Circuit gained 3 more judges)
The Democrats are the last people allowed to bitch about it when they introduced bypassing cloture when it suited their needs. Reap what you sew sound familiar? If it suits their interests they can introduce a rule change to require cloture on both all Judges again. I certainly hope that the Senate moves back in that direction, but have no hopes that the Democrats want such a thing.
Schumer also forgot about demanding President Bush not dare introduce a Supreme Court nominee in his last 18 months in office. Then got upset after President Obama did exactly that and could not get a hearing on his candidate. You know what they say, "Karma is a b**ch!".
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
>> Gorsuch will "face cases that demand a solid command of the complex issues digital technology raises..." If you think a 49-year old justice will be bad at tech, you should look up the ages of the rest. There's even one on there named "Ginsburg" who was 35 when Gorsuch was born - probably time for her to finally head out to pasture, right?
Whatever you may think of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's politics or decisions, she is an intellectual giant, much smarter and sharper than the vast majority of people half her age. There's a good reason she and Scalia were such good friends. Despite almost polar opposite politics, there were few others in the world that were their intellectual equal. And they were both wise enough to understand that associating yourself only with those whose political beliefs are aligned with yours is really self-limiting, and ultimately rather boring.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Perhaps those numbers have more to do with the types of judges nominated than the actual parties doing the blocking. Democrats tend to want to pack courts with activists while Republicans trend more towards actual judges. There's much more reason to object to ideological activists being appointed to life time positions on courts than to object to those that actually try to follow the law and not their feelings when ruling.
Pro death penalty I can see, the other two not so much. He has complained about liberals trying to legislate in the court room when they can't get laws passed, including on gay rights issues. He has also commented that abortion rights are dependent on the court's finding that a fetus does not qualify as a person, which even the most liberal judge should agree with.
Yet the Republicans passed the majority of nominees without any problem. You should at least consider the possibility that the few (it was more than one) being held up were of particular concern. Instead of changing nominees, as Schumer demanded the Republicans do, they changed the rules and packed courts with additional judges.
According to the Congressional Research Service, there were 68 presidential nominees for various positions filibustered between 1949 (basically when the Senate began allowing filibusters on nominations) and 2008. The Republicans had filibustered 79 of President Obama's nominees between 2008 and 2013 when Reid used the nuclear option.
In other words, in a little over 4 years, the Republicans filibustered more presidential nominees than had been filibustered in the preceding 60 years. That doesn't sound like selecting just a few people "of particular concern" to me.
By the way, I strongly disapproved of the nuclear option back then, as I still do now. There are Rules of the Senate, and this is using a ridiculous parliamentary loophole with no Constitutional foundation to override previous Rules of the Senate (which normally require a 2/3 majority to amend).
Frankly, I'd first prefer to see the federal judiciary self-destruct to the point that it actively went to war against Congress itself because of staffing issues... as with the Civil Rights Act (which eventually passed after 60+ days of filibustering) eventually someone will give. Eventually there would be some compromise. No longer. Now it's party line forevermore. Just wait -- in a few decades that Senate will be voting to take away Constitutional rights by party vote.
The nuclear option will come back to haunt them.
You would think that the party of the filibuster as a basic tactic would have figured this out, because as that "commie bitch" on the Supreme court noted, the situation is a pendulum, and if you do a little math and dating, the Democrats are poised for ramming some supreme court nominees who are not going to be appreciated by the Republicans.
That's so obvious that it qualifies not as the law of nintended consequences, but more like plain old unfixable stupid.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.