Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nev. pauses during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 21, 2013, after the Democrat majority in the Senate pushed through a major rules change, one that curbs the power of the Republican minority to block President Barack Obama's nominations for high-level judgeships and cabinet and agency officials. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) (AP2013)
As a nominee for the position of Treasurer of the United States I had to go through the Senate confirmation process. I faced the prospect of the threat of a filibuster that for a short time a senator had on all President Bush’s Treasury appointees, a threat completely and totally unrelated to my personal confirmation.
I can then understand why it would seem so much easier to have a simple majority decide the fate of a presidential appointee. As a result I became acutely aware that any appointee can, for no valid reason, face the prospect of a filibuster. All appointees in the Bush administration knew it could happen to any of us. That’s just the way it was, and when one agrees to the honor of being confirmed by the Senate, one also agrees to the less than perfect process one has to endure.
In attempting to create a distraction, however, they ironically have brought upon the Senate more bickering, more partisanship and more rancor. I predict very soon they will wish they had not been so shortsighted.
Nothing at this point surprises me about the shenanigans in Washington, including the recent and most egregious power grab by Senate Leader Harry Reid regarding the Senate confirmation process. Senator Reid ended the filibuster privilege of the senate on presidential nominations, except those regarding the Supreme Court. I am, nevertheless, dumbfounded at how the media rushed to defend the Democrats’ unilateral action.
The bias the media has displayed in this particular issue is utterly stunning. I wonder how they would have reacted if President George W. Bush aided by a then Republican senate leader would have done away with the presidential appointments filibuster. But wait! I don’t have to wonder because there are abundant articles written at that time about how the traditions of the senate must be kept, how one by one, then Senators Obama, Biden, Reid, Clinton and others, defended the almost sacredness of the filibuster.
Now that the liberals in the senate have carried it through and the President has cheered them on, the liberal media, in their editorials, has justified the power grab, while (gasp) at the same time they have admonished Republicans about any possible retaliation. How blind could the Democrat senators be to the future consequences of their actions for a very short-term gain? And how can the media be so complicit? Where is their objectivity? Didn’t they read their own editorials of just a few years ago?
Or maybe, just maybe, they are so desperate to change the subject from the abject failure of Obamacare that they see this opportunity as one to rally their most ardent supporters by vilifying the Republicans. In attempting to create a distraction, however, they ironically have brought upon the Senate more bickering, more partisanship and more rancor. I predict very soon they will wish they had not been so shortsighted.
I want to remind our illustrious Democrat senators of the words of Abraham Lincoln in a speech at Cincinnati, Ohio on September 17, 1859, “...I do not mean to say that this government is charged with the duty of redressing or preventing all the wrongs in the world, but I do think that it is charged with the duty of preventing and redressing all wrongs which are wrongs to itself.” Senators, when you eliminated the filibuster, you may not have realized it at the time, but you have wronged yourselves in the process.
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