>Bullshit. Voting to confirm an ideological foe is not the same as
>nominating an ideological foe, and you know the difference is significant.
>
>-- Luke
-sorry, luke. i think yoshi's right. it's splitting hairs to write of -nominating vs voting. one must go by a person's actions, particularly a -politician's record.
Then you sound like Bush, who pretends to not understand that the meat of politics is in the amendment process, not the final votes. Once the final vote comes, no one is voting based on substance -- since the result is usually foregone -- but voting on positioning. The fact that I hear people going on and one about final votes, while ignoring sharp partisan differences on the amendment process, where actual victories are usually won and lost, makes me wonder if folks have even studied the basics of how Congress works.
If someone already has the votes for confirmation, there are good arguments to vote to confirm as well, even if you would have voted to oppose them if you had 50 other votes to actually defeat them. While leftists take great joy in mounting a record of losing all the time and being obstructionist, it's actually useful rhetorically at times to save opposition for when you can win, so you can say the guy (or woman) you are opposing is uniquely bad.
Dems have filibustered a bunch of appeals judges but they made the judgement that if they opposed them all, they wouldn't win the public debate and might even lose some of their more moderate colleagues, who wouldn't agree to be identified with their efforts. You could have had 30 Senators voted "No" on every Bush appeals judge, but the result would likely have been never getting the 41 votes needed to filibuster and defeat the ones they did.
-- Nathan Newman