Yes, I know that's impossible. But it sure would be a good name for a movement right now.
The Senate has effectively abandoned its Constitutional responsibility of advice and consent to Presidential nominees to Federal courts and Executive branch positions.
This has two unequal parts, as we all know:
The Republicans don't want government to work, so they block Obama's nominees by the truckload, and a good part of the reason with respect to Executive branch positions is to ensure that the government doesn't have the people in place to enable it to function. And in the Judicial branch, they're perfectly happy to have courts whose judges have largely been appointed by Republican Presidents, and don't want to give Obama the chance to even things up.
The GOP would at least have an argument that they were providing advice and (non)consent if they allowed almost all nominees to proceed as far as a floor debate before filibustering them, but of course even that is infrequent.
While the GOP is abusing the process, the Dems have the ability to stop the abuse by ending the filibuster, at least with respect to Presidential appointments. While it's true that the overwhelming majority of Democratic Senators favor filibuster reforms going well beyond what Harry Reid's been willing to push for so far, they unfortunately don't appear to constitute a majority of the Senate as a whole.
One wonders if drawing a greater degree of public attention to the failure of the Senate to perform its Constitutional obligations might nudge a few of the Democratic holdouts to support the 'constitutional option' that would bring all Presidential nominees to a vote. Can't hurt.
On edit: the settings for this post say comments are open, but when I open the thread, it says comments are closed. I hope y'all are able to comment. If and when you can, it's an open thread, as usual.
