Bart Stupak: “Absolutely. If a filibuster is so bad, it should go to 51 votes and not 60, and do it for everything. If you are going…”

“Absolutely. If a filibuster is so bad, it should go to 51 votes and not 60, and do it for everything. If you are going to do it for the judges, do it for everybody. Let us do it for the environmental laws, labor laws. Let us do it for trade agreements, defense; let us do it before we go to war, as we did in Iraq. That took 60 votes. But we only want to do it for the select few people. So if you are really going to have a majority and minority party, if you are going to respect the spirit and the thought behind a minority party being respected by the majority party, if you are going to change the rules, apply them to all of the rules, not selective rulemaking. That is worse than the autocracy or dictatorship or whatever word you want to use where one party determines everything. That is where you have to be very careful. In my home State of Michigan, we had a judge nominated by President Clinton, Judge White, who sat for over 7 years. Judge White never got a hearing, never did anything. The majority party, then the Republican Party, said we are not going to look at it. I am not saying that is the reason why they are blocking this handful of nominees by the President, because of Judge White; but the point being we have never seen the threat of nuclear option being used before. We saw Judge White sit there for 7 years and was certainly fit for the job.…”