Ambushing someone is a tactic as old as mankind. Men have ambushed each other since Cain killed Abel.
Ambush is an effective tactic. It allows one side to attack while the other side has to react in surprise.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is a master of the political ambush, and he is doing it this week. He surprised the Senate by filing cloture (a motion to end debate) and force a vote on two of President Obama’s most radical nominees. Reid is within the rules in doing this, but just because he is within the rules, doesn’t make it right.
Reid filed a motion for cloture on a judge Barack Obama has nominated to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals: Michelle Friedland may be the single worst nominee in the history of bad nominees from the Obama Regime.
Friedland is a member of the law firm of Munger, Tolles and Olson. In 2012, that firm gave $65,531 to Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. Since then, two lawyers from that firm have been tapped to be judges on the 9th Circuit, and Friedland would be the third from the same law firm.
Friedland believes in the dictatorship of the judiciary. One of her most shocking quotes is, “The Constitution only creates rights to the extent a judiciary says it does.” Translation, the Constitution really does not matter. All that matters is what those people wearing black robes say.
Friedland only gets worse. America’s founding fathers set forth a simple principle. The federal Constitution guaranteed certain rights. State constitutions were permitted to go further in protecting rights. Friedland objects to state constitutions having any force at all. She dismisses states that provide for election of judges by the people.
Friedland has taken radical positions, even for a lawyer in California. She worked against Proposition 8, the voter-passed amendment to the California Constitution that defined marriage as a union between one man and one woman.
Friedland seeks to cede American sovereignty to international courts. In two cases, she supported foreign murderers who objected to their convictions, not because they were not guilty but because their consulates had not been notified of their arrests. The Supreme Court rejected that argument.
Elections have consequences. When the Republicans selected the worst candidate in the history of the GOP as its nominee in 2012, they ceded the field to Obama. Now, Obama gets to appoint judges who have lifetime appointments to the federal court. This will be Obama’s legacy long after he is gone.
The other nominee the Senate will vote on is David Weil, the nominee to be the head of the Wage and Hour Division of the Labor Department.
Weil is the prototypical Obama appointee. The Wall Street Journal described him as “a life-long, left-wing academic with labor-union sympathies, no private-sector experience or legal training, and limited management experience.”
Like most Obama nominees, Weil wants to rewrite the regulation book to suit his view of the world, not the laws Congress has passed. Weil wants to redefine the term “employees” so that subcontractors and franchisees would be considered employees. This would devastate the American economy and small business.
Because of changes in rules, filibusters for most nominees, other than Supreme Court nominees, now only need a majority vote. With a number of Democrats on the endangered species list in the Senate, there is a real chance conservatives can kill both of these nominations.
Harry Reid filed for cloture to end debate so he could bring radicals Michelle Friedland and David Weil up for a vote before conservative groups could rally to try to stop them.
But if these nominees are such a great nominees, why do Reid and the Democrats have to proceed to a nominating vote by ambush?
The cloture vote is set for Thursday. That gives conservatives little time to work to stop what may be two of the worst nominees Obama has sent to the Senate.
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