May 10, 2005
Things may get interesting in Washington this week.
The Senate republican leadership may let us know what they intend to do about the filibuster.
Democrats want to keep it.
Most republicans want to get rid of it when it comes to the confirmation of federal judges and have a majority vote, not the 60-vote majority now required to end debate.
Charles Pickering, Sr. wrote a column in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.
He’s the judge democrats filibustered to death a couple of years ago.
Judge Pickering suggests a constitutional amendment be introduced requiring all federal judges to abide by the words of the constitution and not their personal feelings, interpretations of it, or international law.
That sounds good, but democrats would never vote for it because the liberal judges they like have been making law for years with their rulings.
Democrats know they would not survive in Congress if they pushed these things, themselves, so they put judges on the bench who do their dirty work for them and never have to stand for election.
That’s the game.
We’re about to learn if republicans are tired of playing by those rules and will return to the original ones.
In Kalamazoo, Michigan, I’m Cal Thomas.
Beyond The News Commentaries, produced daily by Salem Communications, bring concise and penetrating insight to everything from the current headlines to challenges facing the church, from our culture wars to the Middle East conflict and from Hollywood to Washington, D.C. These daily features cover politics, culture, religion and science with perspective from the sharpest minds in the Christian and conservative world today: David Aikman, Terry Eastland, Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved, Albert Mohler, Dennis Prager and Janet Parshall.
