Advice and Consent Quotes
President George Washington dispatched David Humphreys on a secret mission to establish a diplomatic mission in Lisbon. To maintain the secrecy, he did not ask the Senate to confirm the appointment in advance.
At the beginning of the Trump presidency, he had a very diffferent idea of the role of the Senators in the Appontment of the Cabinet then other Presidents have had and certainly that most senators had. However, the Republicans held the majority and most were cowed by the threat of Trump encouraging the nativists and the Tea Party to run against them from the right in the next primary.
Most legislative bodies have rules about when and under what conditions a vote is taken. Amendments, procedures, committees all have procedures where votes may be taken that could defeat a nomination or a proposed law but if those defeats fail, there still is not necessarily a law passed or a nomination confirmed. That has to be a separate vote, often called an “up or down vote.” One parliamentary mechanism for opposing a bill or a nomination is to keep voting on amendments and procedures and never have an up or down vote. This is actually true with the vast majority of the laws proposed in both houses of the Congress. Most never do have an up or down vote. Why Gerhatdt and other ask should judicial nominations be different from any law, or any other presidential nomination? Also see {588517} for another factor.
The issue of how the federal judiciary would be selected was one of the more hotly debated issues during the Constitutional Convention.
