“This is a needless exercise and a waste of the Senate’s time because I assume these 17 people already have a job,” Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said. “What we’re worried about is all the people who don’t currently have a job who might in some way benefit from a jobs package that we are by and large in agreement on.”
The standoff potentially could keep the Senate voting on judges through the rest of the month, if cloture is invoked on the nominees one by one. But Senate Democrats hope that an agreement can be reached soon that can ultimately clear the nominees.
Republicans instead want Senate Democrats to take up bipartisan capital formation legislation designed to help small businesses that was recently approved by the Republican-led House and to drop the judge issue, which they argue will get confirmed in the near future.
“We have a way of dealing with the judicial and other appointments in the Senate,” McConnell said. “This effort to have 17 cloture votes in a row is a manufactured crisis. This president has gotten more judges in three years than President Bush got in the last four. We approved 62 last year. We’ve approved seven so far this year.”
“I think I have a pretty good record on being reasonable on judges; this is an unreasonable approach by the Majority Leader,” the South Carolina Republican said. “I’m voting ‘present.’
“I will wind up voting for most of the judges, if not all of them at some point, but I am not going to [allow] the Minority Leader [to be] run over by the Majority Leader.
“I am not against the judges, I am against the process, which will hurt the Senate’s ability to operate in a collegial manner in the future,” Graham added.
Some argue that voting “present” is not a moderate middle ground because cloture requires 60 affirmative votes.
“Voting ‘present’ on a cloture motion is the same as voting ‘no,’” said Glenn Sugameli, a staff attorney with Defenders Of Wildlife in Washington. “You need 60 ‘yes’ votes to break a filibuster, and it doesn’t matter how many Senators vote ‘present’ or ‘no.’”
Democrats said that the judicial vacancy crisis is real, resulting in crowded dockets and unnecessary delays. They argue that the problem is aggravated by GOP slow-walking of judicial nominees, which amounts to a virtual filibuster.
A man from Kentucky attends a Tea Party Patriots rally on the West Front of the Capitol to protest the IRS' targeting of conservative political groups.
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