“I’m surprised that there would be this kind of reaction to him,” said Stabenow. Not me. When it comes to conservatism and orthodoxy, there’s always someone more conservative or orthodox, even if you’re Attila the Hun. Hawley, Cruz, et al are just an example.
So I guess that photo is Debbie Stabenow? Who is first mentioned in the last sentence in the article?
TPM: Please please please start captioning your photos.
Since Dems can’t change the rules, they’ll have to settle for the best possible. The Senate is a mess now and I think Dems really should take some responsibilities for that. GOP is hideous but the Reid Rules and some other stuff also opened the Pandora’s box.
I’m gonna disagree with that. The only thing that pissed me off about Reid was that he didn’t pull the trigger on the nuclear option a few years earlier than he did, right when it became clear that Republicans would lock-step block anything and everything.
They were always going to pull the trigger when they were back in charge.
Kate Riga?
But even if he did, then what? When rethugs are in power, Dems are damned. It’s not a long-term solution.
If it was going to be inevitable that Republicans would pull the trigger in order to stuff the courts (and it was pretty clearly projected that they would), then it’s only a problem that Reid didn’t do it earlier so we could have stuffed the courts first.
As Rumsfeld said, you go to war with the army you have, not the one you might like to have.
We cede way too many goals to republicans by trying to play by rules and norms that they are determined to ignore in order to get their way.
For a moment, I thought the Republican opposition stemmed from the fact that the nominee is transgender.
I agree that it could help stuff the court, but I still don’t think it’s good for the Senate and the country in the long run. The simple majority requirement for confirmation escalated partisanship and put more spotlight on SCOTUS. Sadly, there’re more single-issue GOP voters who can be easily motivated and that’s bad for Dems.
Maybe the way to stop the partisan judge juggernaut is to come out firmly in favor of them…
Oh, I don’t disagree with that. It is bad for it. Would have liked to see that 60-vote threshold in concrete in the Constitution, vice a mere Senate Rule subject to political whims.
But so long as we’re in the environment that we’re in, we need to be going straight for the jugular at every opportunity.
That would certainly send the Republican Senators scurrying, trying to figure out what salient fact about the nominee they’ve missed. Hilarity ensues.
ETA: “We’re all in favor of Joe Blow’s nomination. His long history of support for LGBTQ rights, for abortion on demand, and for ensuring voting rights all make him the ideal candidate for the bench.”
“An excess of cooperation” could be a lot of fun. It makes me think of the Congressional hearings during the McCarthy era. I’ve long thought that refusing to name names was the wrong strategy. The witnesses should have named lots of names - legislators, judges, captains of industry, random names from the phone book - and then defied the committee to disprove the allegations.
It could be the wife in “a Catholic couple”, or it could be one of the “same-sex marriage” (I didn’t look up which sex). I doubt a TPM reporter would be at a dais in front of microphones, which deterred me from @shackle5pin 's hypothesis that it was Kate Riga.
Even easier: Tell Donald that Barack Obama wanted this guy promoted to the Supreme Court.
Just start picking apart their position papers/ decisions regarding abortion. Question whether they’re really a true believer, or if they’re that nightmare closet-pro-choicer.
Ask them if they know anyone who has had an abortion, if they have any family members or friends who have done so. Could be an indicator of someone sympathetic to that who can’t be relied on.
Boy howdy!
Unlike many Trump judicial nominees, Bogren is not actively involved in the conservative Federalist Society and does not have the backing of conservative judicial groups willing to spend money to ensure he gets confirmed.
This makes me wonder how Bogren got so far in the process to begin with. I thought McConnell, the Fedetalist Society, and Leonard Leo were on top of all Trump’s judicial nominees.
Maybe they’re already running out of hacks.
federal district court nominee Michael Bogren
From a quick look at his picture it’s obvious why any reich minded GOPer would oppose the nomination.