Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

No Left Turns

Lott and Pickering II

A few days ago I said here that Lott’s comments would come back to haunt him with regards to the nomination of Judge Pickering to the Fifth Circuit. Well, the Washington Post yesterday said that liberal advocacy groups are planning on using the comments to help derail the nomination. This presents a significant difficulty for the party. Lott was intent on bringing Pickering forward, but in doing so he may hand the Democrats a perfect case to test the filibuster. The filibuster is fundamentally an exercise in political gambling: if it is successful, the party exercising it gains in power and political capital, while if it fails, the failure weakens your standing. At best, Lott’s position as foot-in-mouth orator and Pickering proponent gift wraps an issue for the Democrats to beat up the majority over; at worst, if could give them a formula to draw first blood by blocking a judge after the change in leadership.

Discussions - No Comments Yet

Leave a Comment

* denotes a required field
 

No TrackBacks
TrackBack URL: https://nlt.ashbrook.org/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/837


Warning: include(/srv/users/prod-php-nltashbrook/apps/prod-php-nltashbrook/public/sd/nlt-blog/_includes/promo-main.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /srv/users/prod-php-nltashbrook/apps/prod-php-nltashbrook/public/2002/12/lott-and-pickering-ii.php on line 383

Warning: include(): Failed opening '/srv/users/prod-php-nltashbrook/apps/prod-php-nltashbrook/public/sd/nlt-blog/_includes/promo-main.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:/opt/sp/php7.2/lib/php') in /srv/users/prod-php-nltashbrook/apps/prod-php-nltashbrook/public/2002/12/lott-and-pickering-ii.php on line 383