In the annals of both-sides-isms, this is a doozy: Washington Post reporter Ed O'Keefe reports from nearby a Republican fainting couch on the threat that Democrats—let us pause to brace ourselves against the alarming charge—may go against traditional happy puppy comity when it comes to some of Donald Trump's (cough) more unusual presidential nominees.
Democratic senators plan to aggressively target eight of Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees in the coming weeks and are pushing to stretch their confirmation votes into March — an unprecedented break with Senate tradition.
I know that this is bringing up things from the before-times of, say, five minutes ago, but for the span of nearly one full year the Republican Senate refused to allow a sitting president to nominate any nominee, period, to the Supreme Court of the United States.
Not because the nominee was a bad nominee. Not because the nominee was controversial, or because more information needed to be gathered. The refusal was because Republican senators simply did not agree that the sitting president had the right or constitutional duty to fill the seat at all, with anyone, because those Republican senators did not want him to. So there were no hearings. There were no questions. There was, according to Senate Republicans, no legitimate right of their president to nominate a new justice at all—because they said so.
So unless Senate Democrats are announcing that Donald Trump isn't allowed to have a Cabinet at all, delaying some of the more controversial nominees by ten weeks or so ain't an "unprecedented break with Senate tradition." If we're hitting March of 2018 and Senate Democrats are still blocking some of Donald Trump's nominees, call me the hell back up and I'll have the official journalism fainting couch reupholstered at my personal goddamn expense so everyone can have a good, solid professional pundit vapor-storm over the lack of comity. Otherwise, shut the hell up.
All right, though, let's see what's really going on here in this unprecedented break with the valued traditions of the Senate that everybody gives so very many shits about again as of—hang on, let me check my watch—this freaking afternoon. What, pray tell, is the drama that will be requiring us to put on our new can't everybody get along pundit faces while we all make mewing noises about this terrible new development that will Make The Senate A Sadder Place?
Such delays would upend Republican hopes of quickly holding hearings and confirming most of Trump’s top picks on Inauguration Day. But Democrats, hamstrung by their minority status, are determined to slow-walk Trump’s picks unless they start disclosing reams of personal financial data they’ve withheld so far, according to senior aides.
You're ... you're kidding me, right?
So the issue is that eight or so of Trump's most controversial picks, people like Exxon's Rex Tillerson, the anti-public-education Betsy DeVos, the wealthy fast food magnate Andrew Putzer and Scott Pruitt, who still hasn't managed to explain how industry-written talking points ended up getting shipped out on his Attorney General office letterhead in stalwart battle to protect America's most polluting industries—the issue is that the last of them may not be confirmed until March if they continue to withhold financial information about how their new government posts may or may not being used to crookedly enrich their already rich selves. And if they do withhold it? They'll be confirmed anyway, but it might take as many weeks as it takes for your average state to mail you a new drivers license.
That's it.
Oh, the horror. Oh, the lack of comity. Oh, the mere thought that some of these unqualified millionaires and billionaires appointed to, most observers can agree, weaken and/or gut the government agencies they are being appointed to may have to wait until March to possibly be crooked or possibly not be crooked. How will the republic survive. Truly, this is the biggest test of our democracy we have faced since at least last Tuesday. I for one am online right now, looking up how to build a survival bunker so that my child may live through this apocalypse and come out the other side, hopefully into a new future where Rex Fucking Tillerson's motives are not questioned and Betsy DeVos doesn't have to disclose whether she does or doesn’t make a buck off closing America's public schools. Live, my child. Live, and hope for the return of better days. Live, and after the fires die down rebuild the fainting couches so that our professional pundit class may continue to have the vapors as God and Patrick Freaking Henry intended.
The current president was denied, for reasons having nothing at all to do with his non-whiteness or the devolution of the Republican Party into a Constitution-punching you lie-shouting Jade Helm-believing-in secret-Muslim-secret-not-a-citizen-secretly-in-league-with-communists-suspecting pack of shrieking howler monkeys, the constitutionally mandated duty of filling a Supreme Court vacancy—to say nothing of countless other vacancies up and down the federal courts and elsewhere in government—because the Republican senators didn't feel like it.
Now the signal fires are being lit because a collection of people worth billions of dollars who don't feel like filling out paperwork may have to wait until March to get their names stenciled on their parking spaces?
I'm going to fire your fainting couches into the sun. I'm going to crowdsource a rocket, I'm going to hire Elon Musk to build the rocket, and I'm going to find your damn fainting couches and fire them into the sun. Our sun. The big one.
And then I'm going to feed comity to my family pets and send you the videotapes of me doing it.