Will the Senate pull the nuclear trigger - again?

Will the Senate pull the nuclear trigger - again?

By:

LeRoy Goldman

Columnist

Asheville Citizen-Times

January 22, 2017

The inauguration of President Trump ushers in a period of change and tumult that does not occur frequently. But Trump came out of nowhere and won the Republican nomination and the presidency when almost no one expected that he would do anything but flame out.

The 2016 election is one for the books. It was a stunning upset that put egg on the faces of many professional pollsters, and left the Democrats gasping for breath. It gave the voters a crystal clear choice between continuity and change. Change won. Now the Republicans must stand and deliver.

Some of those changes President Trump will be able to accomplish unilaterally with the stroke of a pen by annulling executive orders put in place by his predecessor. And in foreign relations, the president also has great freedom to act without having to seek congressional approval. However, for the most part the changes that the president will seek will require affirmative action by Congress either in the form of new law, appropriations, or both.

The agenda is mind-boggling, complex and controversial. Here’s a sampler: the repeal and replacement of Obamacare, tax reform, energy independence, border security, Supreme Court nominations, the infrastructure rebuild, immigration reform, job creation, homeland security, and the fundamental rewrite of federal work rules that will enable the President to separate the wheat from the chaff in the calcified and unaccountable federal bureaucracy.

On first blush it would appear that the way is clear for the newly minted president to put his program in place. The GOP controls both houses of Congress. But there’s a fly in the ointment, a lethal fly.

Although the GOP controls the Senate by a 52-48 margin, they are far short of the 60 vote super majority that is now necessary to pass legislation or approve nominations to the Supreme Court. The likelihood that at least eight Democrats will vote with the GOP on these matters is nonexistent. Thus, absent something extraordinary, the Senate will be the graveyard for most of the president’s program.

The Senate has brought itself to its knees by its abuse of the filibuster. The abuse has been bipartisan, led by whichever party happens to be in the minority. Current Senate rules require a 60 vote super majority to end a filibuster or threatened filibuster. Those rules have eviscerated the Senate.

The filibuster is not a part of the Constitution. In fact its birth in 1806 was accidental and stemmed from a revision of Senate rules recommended by its presiding office, Vice President Aaron Burr. One of the changes was the elimination of a rule that allowed a simple majority to end debate. That rule change created the filibuster. The first filibuster did not occur until the 1850s. Filibusters remained rare from then until well into the 20th century. However, since the early 1990s, the use of the filibuster by the minority party has skyrocketed to the point of absurdity. Now it’s routine for the minority party to filibuster or threaten to filibuster all major legislation and many judicial nominations.

The Senate can, if it wishes, circumvent the suffocating effect of the filibuster and the 60 vote super majority. It can do so by triggering what is known as the nuclear option. Invoking the nuclear option would enable the Senate to approve measures with a 51-vote majority.

In November of 2013 then Senate majority leader, Democrat Harry Reid, invoked a limited version of the nuclear option thus enabling all presidential nominations to the executive branch and the federal judiciary, excepting the Supreme Court, to be approved by 51 votes.

Senate Democrats and President Obama enthusiastically supported Reid’s move. Republicans, led by their Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, cried foul.

Now Senate Majority Leader McConnell needs to return Reid’s favor and expand the use of the nuclear option to legislation and to nominations to the Supreme Court. If McConnell has not the backbone to end the abuse of the filibuster, he will bear the responsibility for having been responsible for, in my opinion, the single most destructive act of political malpractice in modern times.

If McConnell invokes the nuclear option, the Democrats will predictably go berserk. But it’s not the end of the world for them or the nation. They have recourse. They can develop better policy prescriptions and better candidates for national office and reclaim the governing mandate at the ballot box in 2018 and 2020. It’s called democracy, and, unlike the filibuster, it is in the Constitution.

LeRoy Goldman lives in Flat Rock and can be reached at:

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Demystifying the success of Trump

Demystifying the success of Trump

By

LeRoy Goldman

Columnist

BlueRidgeNow.com

Times-News Online

January 15, 2017

Nobody, and I mean nobody, took Donald Trump’s candidacy seriously.

At the beginning in 2015, such universal disregard was predictable and understandable. After all, he was a Democrat turned Republican of sorts. He had little or no political experience. He was unorganized, a loudmouth, and demonstrated little or no knowledge of domestic or international policy issues.

Giving him the benefit of the doubt, he was a joke whose demise appeared inevitable.

But in early 2016, he began to win Republican primaries. As his victories piled up, his Republican opponents, the conservative intelligentsia, most of the print and electronic media, and the Democrats chose not to wise up. Somehow they deluded themselves into thinking he would be rejected at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

When that didn’t happen, they then assumed Hillary Clinton, with President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle in tow, would pulverize him on Nov. 8. When that didn’t happen, the sore losers predictably needed scapegoats to blame — FBI Director James Comey, Russian hackers, fake news stories, and angry white men. Now they believe Trump will destroy America.

What we’ve got here is a combination of political correctness prejudice, the blind leading the blind and the Keystone Kops. Let’s try to unpack this nonsense to see how Trump won and what it may portend for his presidency.

The election of Trump is understood by grasping two points, both important, but one of pre-eminent significance. The lesser of the two is that he faced a fatally flawed and deplorable adversary in Clinton.

Clinton demonstrated in 2008 that she knew how to turn victory into defeat. She wrongly assumed her nomination and election were inevitable. She was a terrible campaigner, wooden and defensive. She surrounded herself with a staff of haughty yes-people. And she woefully underestimated the strength of her rival, Obama.

In 2016, she doubled down on those same mistakes and added more. She was never able to get in front of the crisis she created with her home-brewed email system. She never had a message of change in a change election. She wrongly assumed that demonizing Trump would take her to the promised land. Instead, it took her to Chappaqua, N.Y.

However, Clinton didn’t lose this election. Trump won it. How and why he won it remains opaque to most Americans because Trump does not fit the normal pattern of behavior we know about politicians.

And there’s more. The institution in America that one would reasonably and properly expect to help us comprehend how atypical Trump was as a candidate, and how atypical he likely will be as president, is the press. But the press failed us by failing to follow its prime directive, to report the news whether it liked it or not. Instead, most of the mainstream print and electronic press spent the campaign behaving as if it was an extension of the Clinton campaign. Its hatred of Trump was palpable.

The withering anti-Trump onslaught from Andrea Mitchell, Katy Tur, Kasie Hunt and Hallie Jackson on NBC and MSNBC was a lesson in journalism at its worst. What’s more is that these folks and many of their colleagues in the press brainwashed themselves in the process into believing Clinton’s victory was in the bag.

The best example of that was there for all of us to see on the Sunday before the election when, on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopolus,” the time came for its power panel to predict the outcome of the election. That’s when lead panelist Matthew Dowd predicted that Clinton would win at least 431 electoral votes and would win the greatest diversity victory in the nation’s history.

Dowd’s prediction was delivered with certainty and glee. The following Sunday, Dowd was nowhere to be seen.

Trump won because he’s qualitatively different than the 15 opponents he defeated in the GOP primaries and the Democrat he defeated in the general election. Unlike all of his opponents, Trump sensed the fury in the heartland that has been building for years against Washington.

Correctly sensing that fury enabled Trump to successfully declare war not only on Clinton and the Democrats but also on the Republican Party. In so doing, he has brought both to their knees, a stunning accomplishment that the press has yet to tell you about! There is good reason to believe he will remake the GOP. Whether the Democrats comprehend that they face an equally daunting challenge is anybody’s guess.

OK, so Trump won. But how will he govern? Will he now become indistinguishable from the swamp creatures he follows, like Obama and Bush? I doubt it for two reasons. First, he really is different. He’s not a Washington insider. He loathes and distrusts them. More importantly, he knows that if he doesn’t deliver on draining the swamp, he’s a goner in 2020.

In fact, we already have evidence of how profoundly different the Trump presidency will be. As its first act of business, on Jan. 3, the House GOP Caucus voted to gut the independent U.S. Office of Government Ethics. The move was inappropriate and stupid. The optics politically were incomprehensible.

Trump did not duck and cover. Instead, he immediately launched a twitter blast at his own party members. They promptly turned tail and reversed course.

A new day is about to dawn in Washington. It’s long overdue.

LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident. Reach him at:  

EmailMe