Dems need to get tougher with GOP over Chuck Hagel

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/02/11/dems-need-to-get-tougher-with-gop-over-chuck-hagel/


Dems need to get tougher with GOP over Chuck Hagel

Posted by Jonathan Bernstein on February 11, 2013 at 5:31 pm


With Chuch Hagel’s nomination scheduled to get through the Armed Services Committee tomorrow, the next step of Republican obstruction will be an effort by Senator Jim Inhofe and others to delay Senate floor action on confirmation. Inhofe, Robert Costa reports, is putting a hold on the nomination:



So we need to talk about holds. A “hold” is simply a request from any Senator for a bill, or in this case a nomination, to not be brought up. The Majority Leader can choose to honor that hold or not. There’s no formal Senate rule at all governing it. Majority Leaders typically honor holds partly for general reasons of comity between Senators.

snip//

I happen to be all for legitimate holds on executive branch nominations; if a Senator has some narrow issue on which he or she seeks to influence the workings of some agency by using a nomination as leverage on behalf of some constituency, I think that’s very clearly within the proper functioning of the Senate. There is absolutely no reason, however, for a small group to be able to defeat — or even to excessively delay — a nominee just because they don’t like him. If they have the votes, fine; if not, the nomination should be brought to the floor and cloture invoked.

This one is going to set the pattern for the 113th Congress. If Harry Reid wants a functioning Senate, he’s going to have to draw a line somewhere against all the obstruction. This is as good a time as any for him to remind Republicans that Democrats actually have a substantial majority in the Senate and they’ll use it — however they need to — to keep the government running smoothly.