| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
Obama’s 2nd Term: Abolish Checks On His Power
From today’s Wall Street Journal column on Barack Obama’s campaign:
The president views a second term in some ways as a second chance, an opportunity to approach the office differently, according to close aides. He would like to tackle issues such as climate change, immigration, education and filibuster reform.
Clearly, Barack Obama still doesn’t care what the American people want or think. Climate change is not a top concern for Americans. Already, efforts by the Obama administration on this topic have killed jobs and slowed growth and hiring in any number of industries (coal, chemicals, oil and gas) but in a second term he will continue to push through regulations and rules interpretations that will accomplish much of what he was unable to do in Congress. He will have more “flexibility.” He has pushed out to 2013 decisions on issues such as the XL pipeline and EPA regulations precisely for this electoral reason.
Immigration reform is a concern – but again it is not one of the top issues either. Education is just a signal that should he be reelected teachers and teacher unions will have hit pay dirt.
But it is the latter item on his to do list that should raise a red flag: filibuster reform.
We know by now what Obama means when he uses the word “reform.” It means revolution.
Filibusters are methods in the Senate that can be used to slow down or stop the passing of major legislation (apart from budgets and confirmations). Senate rules permit a senator, or senators, to speak for as long as they wish, unless “three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn (60 out of 100 senators) bring debate to a close by invoking cloture under Senate Rule XXII.
From Wikipedia:
According to the Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Ballin (1892), changes to Senate rules could be achieved by a simple majority, but only on the 1st day of the session in January or March. Nevertheless, under current Senate rules, a rule change itself could be filibustered, with two-thirds of those senators present and voting (as opposed to the normal three-fifths of those sworn) needing to vote to break the filibuster.[44] Despite this written requirement, the possibility exists that the filibuster could be changed by majority vote, but only on the 1st day of the session in January or March, using the so-called nuclear option, also sometimes called the constitutional option by proponents.
Actually, the nuclear option was triggered by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid last year – not that many in the media noticed the flouting of Senate decorum (Reid is not known for decorum: Obama is “light-skinned” with “no Negro dialect unless he wants one”; Romney is a tax cheat; his insults and accusations regarding George Bush make those made by Barack Obama look like terms of affection).
The Washington Post columnist Marc Theissen took note of the action last year in “Harry Reid’s Nuclear Blunder “
MORE HERE
