Anybody wanna guess how Sen. Voinovich is gonna go on the nuclear option?

Republican
Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio agreed on Thursday to let the contentious
nomination of John Bolton as United Nations ambassador go to the full
senate for a vote. But he issued a scathing attack on Bolton.

Voinovich portrayed Bolton, now the top arms-control diplomat at the State Department, as “arrogant” and “bullying.”

“John Bolton is the poster child of what someone in the diplomatic
corps should not be,” Voinovich said. He said Bolton would be fired if
he was in private business.

“That being said, Mr. Chairman, I am not so arrogant to think that I
should impose my judgment and perspective of the U.S. position in the
world community on the rest of my colleagues,” he added. “We owe it to
the president to give Mr. Bolton an up or down vote on the floor.”

If
Voinovich really thinks that the he “owes” the President the favor of
voting against his conscience, then why the hell does he think the
senate has commitees in the first place? His justification is such an
obvious nod to the filibuster fight, you’ve gotta wonder what Frist
offered him to flip.

Speaking of the nuclear option, you should really check out this Salon article. Not only does it cover everything you might have missed, but it’s funny too :

But
there must be something different in the way that the Democrats are
blocking Bush’s nominees, right? The Republicans say that what the
Democrats are doing is “unprecedented.”

Oh, yes they do. Just the other day on Fox News, Utah Sen. Orrin
Hatch, the former chairman of the senate Judiciary Committee,
proclaimed: “We’ve never had a filibuster of judges in the history of
this country.” In a myth vs. fact sheet, the Republican National
Committee says that “having to overcome a filibuster (or obtaining 60
votes) on judicial nominees is unprecedented.”

But that’s not a fact. In 1968, Republicans led a filibuster against
Lyndon Johnson’s nomination of Abe Fortas as chief justice. And that
isn’t the only Republican attempt to filibuster a judicial nominee in
recent history. During the Clinton years, the Congressional Research
Service says, Democrats were forced to bring cloture motions on six
judicial nominees. While the existence of a cloture motion doesn’t
always mean that a filibuster is in effect, in at least some instances
it has meant just that: In 2000, Frist himself voted to support a
filibuster against Richard Paez, Clinton’s nominee to the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

What do Frist and the GOP say about that?

They’ve become more and more specific about what it is they’re
calling “unprecedented.” Now, instead of saying that filibusters are
unprecedented, Frist says that a judicial nominee “with majority
support” has “never been denied” an up-or-down vote. That formulation
is closer to accurate, but it’s still not quite there. Paez had
“majority support,” but Frist and other Republicans tried to filibuster
his confirmation anyway.

What gives? Frist would say that the Republicans didn’t succeed in
blocking the Paez nomination, so their efforts shouldn’t count against
them. It’s a sin to succeed in blocking a nomination by filibuster,
Republicans say. But trying to block a nomination by filibuster — as
Republicans did repeatedly during the Clinton years? That doesn’t
count, and to say otherwise would be, in the words of the conservative
Committee for Justice, “Orwellian.”

Isn’t that a little like an attempted murderer lording his morality over a murderer who actually succeeds?

You said it, not me.

If the GOP gets their wish of
declawing the judicial brancch to the point of completely undermining
our system of checks and balances, how long do you think it would take
to declare a new constitutional convention? Maybe they’ll finally get
to sneak the ten commandments in there somewhere.