Democrats plot how to sink Trump’s Supreme Court pick
WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats launched a fierce campaign Tuesday to derail President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee by warning of the potential damage he might do to health-care access, abortion rights and the pending federal investigation into Trump’s associates. But Republicans largely rallied around the nominee, U.S. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh, leading party leaders to predict his inevitable confirmation.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters he expected to “handle this nomination fully by the fall” after most Republican senators enthusiastically backed Kavanaugh, a fixture in GOP legal circles for two decades, and key lawmakers expressed few explicit reservations about him.
Meanwhile, Democrats, who remain furious over McConnell’s 2016 move to block President Barack Obama from placing his own nominee on the court, believe their best chance to defeat Kavanaugh lies in highlighting the stakes for average Americans, not in re-litigating past political battles.
Numerous Democratic senators, led by Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said Tuesday that Kavanaugh’s confirmation would cast into doubt a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion as well as the viability of the Affordable Care Act.
“The substance is the way to win this,” Schumer said. “The American people care about their substantive rights being taken away, whether they be civil rights, whether they be labor rights, whether they be health-care rights, whether they be a woman’s right to choose. That’s what we’re focusing on.”
The strategy is aimed in part at turning public opinion against Kavanaugh’s confirmation, but it is more firmly aimed at the votes of two moderate Republican senators, Susan Collins, Maine, and Lisa Murkowski, Alaska, who both tend to support abortion rights and voted last year to reject a bill that would repeal key parts of the ACA.
Democrats are hoping to recapture the energy of that successful push to derail the Republican health-care effort.