If Republicans rewrite Senate rules to more easily end filibusters, the country will experience "exactly the kind of `tyranny of the majority' that James Madison had in mind,"
Cuomo, in the Democratic Party's weekly radio address, said Senate Republicans "are threatening to claim ownership of the Supreme Court and other federal courts, hoping to achieve political results on subjects like abortion, stem cells, the environment and civil rights that they cannot get from the proper political bodies."
"How will they do this? By destroying the so-called filibuster, a vital part of the 200-year-old system of checks and balances in the Senate,"
"The Republicans say it would assure dominance by the majority in the Senate," he said. "That sounds democratic until you remember that the Bill of Rights was adopted, as James Madison pointed out, to protect all of Americans from what he called the `tyranny of the majority.'"
"It sounds nearly absurd when you learn that the minority Democrats in the Senate actually represent more Americans than the majority Republicans do,"
"The Republican senators should instead start working with the Democrats to address all the serious problems of this country in the proper forums — in the Congress and in the presidency — leaving the judges to be judges instead of a third political branch controlled by the whim of the politicians in power,".
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