Work is going to prevent me from focusing closely on things over the next little while - a week should do it, though I’m not making any promises. So I suspect the next couple of days will be either evergreen or linky. (Pipe down there in the back, you “it’s always linky” guy.)
Robert Novak REPORTS on Reid’s first “change.”
Sen. Harry Reid, leading the Senate’s new Democratic majority, is framing next year’s schedule in a way that will make it difficult, if not impossible, for President Bush to give recess appointments to nominees blocked for confirmation.
Reid’s schedule limits Senate recesses to one week. Recess appointments usually are made only when Congress has been out of session for at least 10 days. That may kill any consideration of trying to seat federal appeals court judges whose nominations had been stalled even in the Republican-controlled Senate. The downside may be a rebellion by senators if their breaks are held to one week.
Strange. Is that even allowed? (And I’m ignoring the Mitch McConnell non-call bit because it doesn’t interest me. At all.)
Ed Whelan OBJECTS to the most recent US News ARTICLE on any potential Supreme Court nominations in the next two years. And I notice that they’ve corrected the Leo stuff. Or at least allowed him to make his case a bit more fully.
Andy McCarthy SUMS up the depressing Bolton news, and asks the all-important (but rarely asked) question: why do we bend over backwards for the UN time and time again?
Captain Ed ADDRESSES the leaked Rumsfeld MEMO, and thinks it’s a very bad sign. I sure hope Rumy didn’t leak it. That would not reflect well on the man, and despite the massive criticism (occasionally valid) to which he has been subjected, he has always seemed like a straight shooter. Leakers are not straight shooters, they’re “shoot in the backers.”
But Thomas Sowell is not JUMPING overboard just yet.
The fact that everyone is presumed to be innocent in a court of law until proven guilty does not mean that those of us who are not in a court of law have to make that same presumption. It is part of the mindless repetition of words in our time that so many people cannot make that basic distinction.
Congressman Alcee L. Hastings was not convicted in a court of law of taking bribes when he was a federal judge back in the 1980s. But his fellow judges raised that suspicion, his fellow Democrats in the House of Representatives impeached him and Democrats who controlled the Senate removed him from the federal bench.
What members of Congress were voting on was not whether to send Alcee L. Hastings to jail but whether he was too big a risk to be left with all the powers of a federal judge.
Apparently future House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was willing to risk putting this man with his checkered past in charge of the intelligence committee in the House of Representatives. But outrage among the public, including some in the liberal media, showed that the “non-judgmental” attitude has not yet eliminated common sense and common decency.
There are still flickering signs of hope.
