With the 16th anniversary of the beginning of the Afghanistan War fast approaching, President Trump has announced that he has approved a new strategy in Afghanistan, which will require sending an additional 4,000 troops to the area. Having denounced the war while running for president last year, Trump has now decided to make America’s longest war his own with this new plan.
While completing my list of joint resolutions under the Congressional Review Act, I ran across about 50 joint resolutions introduced in the 115th Congress that propose to amend the U.S. Constitution. I decided to sort through them to find the 10 most popular proposals. I calculated popularity by figuring the percentage of the House of Representatives' or Senate's membership that cosponsored each joint resolution. Because of ties, I ended up with 13 resolutions instead of just 10. You can keep the change and find brief summaries of each below.
On February 13, 2016, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in his sleep. Within hours of the news being released, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) announced that the choice of Scalia's successor should be left to the next president. Accordingly, the Senate refused to so much as hold a hearing on President Barack Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland. Senate Republicans quickly began calling their position the Biden Rule, after a speech that then-Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) made on the Senate floor in 1992. Republicans' treatment of Garland, as well as Democrats' treatment of Scalia's ultimate successor, Neil Gorsuch, lend support to the case made by Biden that Supreme Court nominations should not be considered during a presidential election year.
Starting at 9:00 AM (Central) on April 6, 2017, Jeffrey and I live blogged the Gorsuch cloture vote in the Senate. As we expected, Senate Republicans used a technique commonly referred to as the nuclear option to break a Democratic filibuster. For background, here are three posts that Jeffrey and I wrote on this subject:
With Senate Democrats vowing to filibuster Judge Neil Gorsuch's confirmation to the Supreme Court, the Republicans have also vowed to confirm Gorsuch by Friday night (April 7). It seems that for Gorsuch to be confirmed by this Friday, the nuclear option will have to be utilized. But what would be the result?
Yesterday, the 41st Democratic senator signaled his intention to filibuster the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to be associate justice of the Supreme Court. Today, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) filed a cloture motion on the nomination. This post describes the timing issues involved in invoking cloture and looks at how this week is likely to go.
As the Senate's confirmation vote on Neil Gorsuch approaches, several Senate Democrats (and Bernie Sanders) have argued that there is a 60-vote standard for confirming Supreme Court nominees. This talking point is false. Keep reading to find out why.
Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee held confirmation hearings for President Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Judge Neil Gorsuch. At the conclusion of the hearings, Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) announced that he would support a filibuster against the Supreme Court nominee. This raised the question whether Republicans would use the so-called nuclear option to eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations to confirm Gorsuch. If so, they would be following in the footsteps of former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), who in 2013 used the nuclear option to eliminate the filibuster for all nominations other than to the Supreme Court.
By now it is well known that the Trump administration has sent an additional 400 Marines to aid rebel groups in taking the city of Raqqa, Syria from ISIS (Daesh). One major problem is that there has not been any authorization from Congress for it.