There's No Rule Democrats Won't Change for Their Own Convenience

February 26, 2020 By William Terrell

 

I experienced deja vu watching the Democrats’ rule change to include Michael Bloomberg into their debates, despite their refusal to change those rules for other Democrats who hadn’t met the qualifications for inclusion.  For nearly twenty years I’ve watched Democrats change the rules to suit their convenience of the moment.

For example, those who are old enough will remember the case of Robert Torricelli, the Democrat senator from New Jersey who withdrew from his Senate race because questions about his campaign finance practices were causing him to lose popularity and threaten that his Republican opponent might actually defeat him. However, his withdrawal left the Democrats without a candidate in that race, which in turn endangered their bare 1 seat majority in the Senate. To further complicate matters for the Democrats, the legal deadline to put forward a new candidate had passed.

Never fear. The Democrats went to the friendly New Jersey Supreme Court and got a decision that allowed them to call the venerable Frank Lautenberg out of retirement and run in Torricelli’s stead. And, of course, the seat was saved.

For the second example we move to the Senate. Many readers will also remember the contretemps over George W. Bush’s nomination of Miquel Estrada to the Washington DC district court in 2001. By all accounts, Estrada was supremely qualified to sit on that bench, but he spelled trouble for the Democrats. For one, he was conservative; for two, he was Latino; and for three, he may have been a White House choice for a future Supreme Court nomination.

Thus, at the behest of liberal activists, Democrats, newly in the minority in 2002, would not let Estrada’s nomination come to a vote in the full Senate (a vote they would have lost.) For the first time in history a nominee to a sub-Supreme Court position had been effectively filibustered. Estrada was filibustered seven times until he finally gave up and went into private practice.

The Democrats had again changed the rules.......To Read More....