Let the Senate Advise

Teddy Kennedy editorialized in WaPo Sandra Day O'Connor's retirement gives President Bush, elected by a divided nation that has become even more divided, a unique opportunity to unite us by choosing for the Supreme Court someone who can win support from a broad bipartisan majority in the Senate and whom the vast majority of Americans will be proud of....

And if the Democrats in the Senate can be as reasonable as the Republicans were when Clinton appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer

Andrew McCarthy wrote in National Review blogged The Washington Post ridiculously offers Ted Kennedy as judicial sage.... If anyone really wants to know why the MSM is fading fast, consider one of the most recent classic examples: The decision by the Washington Post to run an op-ed by Ted Kennedy, of all people, about how we need to avoid the rank partisanship of a "divisive battle" over a new Supreme Court justice to replace the departing Sandra Day O'Connor. About how President Bush needs to be more like — are you sitting down for this? — President Reagan in wisely choosing a nominee to the high court. We would need to dig up Yasser Arafat for an op-ed on fixing the "peace process" to concoct something this rich.

ROF,LMAO (rolling on the floor, laughing my a$$ off)

No one on Planet Earth is more singularly responsible for the poisonous state of the confirmations process than the senior senator from Massachusetts.... The Framers' actual vision is the antithesis of Kennedy's depiction. The Framers thought the Senate should have no part of the nomination process at all. And they made this abundantly clear in several ways. First and foremost is the plain language of the Constitution, which draws a bright line between the two powers that are at issue (and that Kennedy disingenuously conflates into one by ignoring the first): nomination and confirmation. Explicitly, the Constitution provides, in pertinent part, that "he [i.e., 'The President'] shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ... judges of the Supreme Court" (see Art. II, Sec. 2, Para. 2) (emphasis added). Literally, the president alone does the nominating; only after the nomination is made does the Senate offer its advice and either consent or demur. Plainly, the "advice" part of "advice and consent" cannot conceivably have been meant, as Kennedy claims, to include review by senators of a pre-nomination list of "prospective nominees." It is the nomination that triggers the advice function, not the other way around. Not only did the framers elucidate this by very unambiguous language. They also placed the clause in Article II, which enumerates executive powers. Thus, the unadorned prerogative to nominate is a unilateral presidential power. It was not, as Kennedy asserts, "envision[ed]" by the Framers as a shared power. To further make the obvious explicit, one of the greatest of the Framers, Alexander Hamilton, provided explanations of the Framers' thinking in The Federalist Papers. "It will be," he wrote in Federalist No. 66, "the office of the President to nominate, and, with the advice and consent of the senate, to appoint. There will, of course, be no exertion of choice on the part of the Senate. They may defeat one choice of the Executive, and oblige him to make another; but they cannot themselves choose — they can only ratify or reject the choice he may have made." (Emphasis added.)