Welcome to your Monday open thread. I hope you all had a happy and safe New Year. Remember, the handheld cell phone ban started yesterday, so don’t text and drive!
Crazy Teapublican Rep. Michele Bachmann told an amazing story of her political transformation.
At a speech to Michigan Republicans on Tuesday, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) — the darling of the Tea Party right — told an amazing story about how she shed her youthful Democratic roots and became a Republican. As she told the tale, her political conversion was because of her disgust at a “snotty” Gore Vidal novel that satirized the Founding Fathers.
“Until I was reading this snotty novel called ‘Burr,’ by Gore Vidal, and read how he mocked our Founding Fathers,” Bachmann told the crowd. “And as a reasonable, decent, fair-minded person who happened to be a Democrat, I thought, ‘You know what? What he’s writing about, this mocking of people that I revere, and the country that I love, and that I would lay my life down to defend — just like every one of you in this room would, and as many of you in this room have when you wore the uniform of this great country — I knew that that was not representative of my country.”
“And at that point I put the book down and I laughed. I was riding a train. I looked out the window and I said, ‘You know what? I think I must be a Republican. I don’t think I’m a Democrat.'”
Wow, that’s pretty unbelievable, even for Bachmann. It makes me want to read “Burr.”
Nearly one in nine federal judgeships are currently vacant, a vacancy rate that is leaving many courts barely able to function. Indeed, the problem has become so severe that Republican Chief Justice John Roberts used his annual year-end report on the federal judiciary to call upon the Senate to end this logjam:
Over many years, however, a persistent problem has developed in the process of filling judicial vacancies. Each political party has found it easy to turn on a dime from decrying to defending the blocking of judicial nominations, depending on their changing political fortunes. This has created acute difficulties for some judicial districts. Sitting judges in those districts have been burdened with extraordinary caseloads. I am heartened that the Senate recently filled a number of district and circuit court vacancies, including one in the Eastern District of California, one of the most severely burdened districts. There remains, however, an urgent need for the political branches to find a long-term solution to this recurring problem.
The Senate might not have that much to do anyway this session considering the antics of the incoming House. Hopefully the filibuster reform will help resolve the problem.