By Rick Manning
A version of this article appeared in The Hill on 11/21/2013
I hope packing the courts with radical nominees is worth it for the Democrats, because they will be in the minority in the Senate in 2015.
And if a Republican wins election to the presidency in 2016, it is likely they will be without any recourse to stop a wholesale expansion and rebalancing of the federal bench to undo their chicanery.
Democratic senators demanding that Republican nominees for the judiciary be subjected to scrutiny on where they stand on abortion won’t matter, and they will be powerless to stop ardently pro-life nominees.
And now that a simple majority of the Senate has changed the rules of the body to accommodate a court-packing scheme, it is merely a matter of time before a simple majority changes the rules to eliminate the filibuster entirely.
Forget everything you learned in civics class. We are entering a brave new world, where the battle for the Senate becomes much more pitched and important because the minority will only have those rights allowed by the majority.
This transformation of the Senate into a body that shockingly resembles the House of Representatives ends its deliberative and necessarily collaborative nature. The minority is now irrelevant.
Let it be remembered that on Nov. 21, 2013, the United States Senate as we know it effectively died, murdered by Harry Reid to protect Obama’s administrative state from legitimate judicial scrutiny.
It is time to move on and accept this new reality, win the next elections and let the Senate Democrats eat the poisoned harvest they have sown.
Manning (@rmanning957) is vice president of public policy and communications for Americans for Limited Government.
