Orrin Hatch: “today we face a real crisis in the confirmation process, a crisis concocted by the majority to distract attention from…”

“today we face a real crisis in the confirmation process, a crisis concocted by the majority to distract attention from the Obamacare disaster and, in the process, consolidate more power than any majority has had in more than 200 years. This crisis was created by a majority that wants to win at all cost, for whom the political ends justify any means whatsoever. The two parts of this crisis are what the majority is doing and how they are doing it. What the majority is doing is terminating the minority's ability to filibuster judicial nominees. If anyone thought that judicial filibusters were so easy that the minority has been doing it indiscriminately, they would be wrong. It is harder to filibuster judges today than at any time since the turn of the 19th century. And the truth is that Democrats are now terminating a practice that they created and that they have used, by orders of magnitude, far more than Republicans. In February 2001, just after President George W. Bush took office, Democrats vowed to use ``any means necessary'' to defeat his judicial nominees. That is one promise Democrats kept. They pioneered using the filibuster to defeat majority-supported judicial nominees in 2003. In fact, 73 percent of all votes for judicial filibusters in American history have been cast by Democrats. By this same point under President Bush, the Senate had taken 26 cloture votes on judicial nominees, more than twice as many as have occurred under President Obama.…”