Senate Dems in denial

Democrats just can’t get out of their own way on the pending nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court.

They desperately need a reason to oppose him — because, well, just because.

He’s a brilliant legal scholar — Columbia, Harvard Law, Oxford — with more than a decade of experience on the federal appeals court and several books to his credit. But, but, but ... Well, he’s President Trump’s nominee. Yes, elections have consequences — something Democrats are still trying to cope with.

And he’s not Judge Merrick Garland — President Obama’s pick to fill the vacancy created by the death of Antonin Scalia. Some Democratic senators believe that revenge on their Republican colleagues is more important than giving this nominee a fair shake.

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) actually told Gorsuch she was “deeply disappointed that it’s under these circumstances that we begin our hearing,” making the Senate’s failure to consider the Garland nomination sound like a death in the family.

And Gorsuch is a conservative in the very best sense of that term. As he said of his mentor, Justice Scalia, “He reminded us that words matter, that the judge’s job is to follow the words that are in the law, not replace them with those that aren’t.” What a radical concept! Yesterday, apparently failing to find any good material in the more than 6 million words Gorsuch has written while on the appeals court, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) tried to make Gorsuch accountable for some obscure passage written not by Gorsuch but by his thesis adviser at Oxford. It was a more shameful moment than most — but indicative of the level of Democratic desperation.

There should be consequences for such mindless partisanship. Perhaps by 2018 there will be.