By Rick Manning
A version of this article was published at TheHill.com.
Welcome to the new Senate, the formerly august body where the minority used to be able to influence executive branch nominations through a vetting process and the threat of blocking confirmation is no more.
In their quest to “save” the institution, John McCain (R-Ariz.) and his merry band of quislings have given the president carte blanche to submit anyone he wants for confirmation with a guarantee of quick and easy passage.
Incredibly, McCain and friends even appear to have agreed to not filibuster unknown future NLRB nominees, with a return of former pariah Craig Becker even a possibility. After all, it would be a shame to actually do your constitutionally mandated job and stop nominees who have a proven willingness to put personal agenda over the law.
In my reading of the Constitution, it calls this process advice and consent, not advise and concede.
However, at least the filibuster has been saved, so future Democrat Senate minorities can use it to stop qualified nominees, like Miguel Estrada, based upon their ethnicity.
We have now learned that no Obama nominee is too extreme for the Republican gangsters who now form a filibuster-proof majority for Harry Reid (D-Nev.).
Thomas Perez, who finds the rule of law a minor inconvenience and will use the full enforcement power of the Labor Department to seek out and destroy companies that don’t embrace organized labor, is A-OK.
Gina McCarthy, who Obama announced would be tasked with bypassing Congress using the EPA’s regulatory authority to implement a climate change agenda that would not even pass the Senate, gets the golden ticket.
Richard Cordray, who Obama deemed to be so unconfirmable when he placed him as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau without going through the previously inviolable Senate process, is legitimized in the Republican cave-in.
And Reid retains the hammer of promising to nuke the Senate in the future, whenever he decides the minority party is getting out of its place.
At least those who ganged up on the Republican side to rubber stamp Obama’s radical nominees have stripped away the fiction that electing a Republican majority in the Senate matters.
After all, if the McCain gang is effectively the swing governance party in the Senate, there would not be any policy changes sent to the president’s desk that were not pre-approved by his cabal. That’s not exactly the kind of red meat that turns out voters in an intensity election.
Of course, at least there are always primaries for voters who want their senators to stand up and obstruct the radical Obama agenda to be heard.
Rick Manning is the Vice President of Public Policy and Communications for Americans for Limited Government. You can follow Rick on twitter @rmanning957.
