After four Senate Democrats announced Monday they plan to oppose Neil Gorsuch, the Democratic caucus reached the 41 votes needed to sustain a filibuster against the Supreme Court nominee.
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It is increasingly likely that Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., will blow up – so to speak – how the Senate works (perhaps forever) and eliminate the 60-vote requirement to end debate and advance a nominee for the high court.
The clock is ticking on the showdown as lawmakers prepare to leave Washington for Easter recess at the end of the week. ‘There has never been, ‘ as the New York Times and others reported last week, ‘a successful partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee.’ Never in the history of our country.
Bennet’s announcement prompted praise from Republican Aurora Congressman Mike Coffman, who lauded the Democratic Colorado senator for capitulating on the Gorsuch nomination.
“That’s unfortunate. I do think that we want mainstream judges on the court”, Cardin said.
“This afternoon it has become clear that Judge Gorsuch does not have the 60 votes necessary to end debate on his nomination”. He said the change would apply only to Supreme Court nominations. By Monday night 43 Democrats had said they won’t support Gorsuch.
Following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, Republicans challenged President Barack Obama to nominate a moderate judge they could confirm. “Maybe a light will come on somewhere”, said Sen.
Democrats have accused Gorsuch of being insufficiently independent of Trump, evading questions on key Supreme Court rulings of the past including on abortion and political spending, and favoring corporate interests over ordinary Americans.
McConnell will need to put the rules change to a majority vote.
“We lost one, they lost one”, Schumer said. “We believe that is exactly what should happen now”.
He noted that the Senate, under McConnell’s guidance, refused past year to consider Obama’s nomination of appellate judge Merrick Garland to fill the same high court vacancy that Trump elected Gorsuch to fill.
Senators of both parties bemoaned the further erosion of their traditions of bipartisanship and consensus.
“It’s not because we harbored illusions that we’d usually agree with these nominees of Democrat presidents”.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said: “What the majority leader did to Merrick Garland by denying him a hearing and a vote is even worse than a filibuster”. The nuclear option was last used in 2013 when then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, used it to push through Obama nominees he thought were being unfairly blocked by Republicans.
Republicans vowed immediately to simply change the Senate rules to ensure the conservative judge gets the lifetime job.
“I would like to meet that idiot”.
“I’m going to vote for Judge Gorsuch”, was all Sen.
Nearly two years later, after my first year at Georgetown Law, I served as an intern on then-Sen.
Rather than accept Democrats’ opposition as legitimate, McConnell is dead set on escalation. If the Senate fails to break the filibuster, McConnell then could move on to make the rules change with a simple majority vote of 51 senators.
“Well I know he had great reluctance when the Democrats were going to do it”. John McCain and Democratic Sen. And those grievances are adding up to something that no one on either side seems happy about – forever changing the “world’s greatest deliberative body” into. something else.
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Sen. Susan Collins of ME, who previously stopped short of saying how she would vote on the nuclear option, argued that both parties “will rue the day” that led to the likely rule change.
