Originally posted by: sirjonk
Originally posted by: yowolabi
Worst premise for a thread in a long time. Apparently to be a uniter, you can't believe someone has an excellent resume but is not the best person for the job.
No, the fact remains that Obama continued the long time Democratic party tradition of rejecting qualified SC nominees because of their personal views. Both of Clinton's nominees were almost unanimously confirmed and it wasn't because they were somehow more qualified than Roberts. For the last 30 years democratic senators have been pretty dickish about confirming any republican nominees to the court, while Reps have been pretty accepting of Democratic presidential nominees. Obama says he's post partisan, but couldn't bring himself to vote for a superlatively qualified jurist.
sirjonk, that's not really an accurate history.
Republicans went to Clinton and told him if he nominated the liberal they understood he wanted, he'd have a huge fight on his hands; if he nominated the compromise candidate they suggest, they'd vote for her. Clinton, compromiser that he is, took the deal and appointed the compromise. Bush, on the other hand, never appointed a compromise, he appointed horrible radicals. It's highly unfair for you to put the Republicans in some 'cooperative' light from that.
The R epublicans were also infamous for abusing the process, while democrats were far more accommodating. Republicans, for example, made a huge issue of Clinton's tiny number of recess appointments, and blackmailed him into giving up some of his power by saying if he did not give them advance written notice of his planned recess appointments so they could take measures to oppose them, then they would vote against every single one of his nominees. Again, he gave in and gave them what they wanted.
Of course, when Bush was elected, all the abusive processes the Republicans had set up for Clinton were removed.
There's also some complexity because the democrats and republicans used different procedures to block nominees, so it's easy to create a misleading picture by cherry-picking the data presented to just the technique favored by one or the other. The numbers show that the Republicans were the major obstructionists to appointments, setting new precedents in the extremes they went to, for just one example ending the long tradition of one Senator being able to block a federal court nominee for their state.
Under Clinton, Republicans changed the rule after decades to require both Senators to block - and then changed it back to one as soon as Bush took office.
