Vote on Gorsuch is giant
Decision, expected the first week of April, could tip political balance to the right
Votes on the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court are expected to take place the first week of April, setting up a political clash that could tip the current political balance at the court and bring an end to the ability to filibuster such nominees.
There are four Democrats and four Republicans on the Supreme Court, with the most senior member, Republican Anthony Kennedy, often viewed as a swing vote.
Seth Masket, chairman of the political science department at the University of Denver, said if President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland had been confirmed to fill the seat that became vacant with the death of hard-line conservative Antonin Scalia, the court would have moved to the left. Republicans, noting that it was an election year, refused to hold hearings on that nomination.
“Assuming Gorsuch gets approved, the court likely will be as conservative as it was with Scalia, and the court’s ideological makeup won’t change very much from what it was with Scalia,” Masket said.
Four days of confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee ended Thursday. Gorsuch, a Colorado native and judge on the Denver-based 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, emerged relatively unscathed, with what could be a clear path to a seat on the nation’s highest court.
U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has said Republicans in the Senate plan to confirm Gorsuch before a two-week break that starts April 10.
On Thursday, the day Senate hearings on the nomination ended, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said he would vote no on Gorsuch and vowed to filibuster the nomination.
Under the rules of the Senate, it takes 60 votes to overcome such an obstacle, and Republicans have 52 senators. Those numbers mean Republicans would need eight votes from Democrats or Independents to move Gorsuch’s nomination forward under current senate rules.
With that slim margin, intense pressure will
be placed on U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado, who isn’t up for re-election until 2022, political observers have said. Liberal groups are counting on Bennet to work to block Gorsuch’s nomination, but he also faces pressure from Republican groups, who can remind him that his fellow senator from Colorado, Republican Cory Gardner, defeated Mark Udall, a Democrat, in 2014.
Republicans have vowed Gorsuch will be confirmed. Republicans can overhaul the Senate’s rules to allow a simple majority to proceed with a vote on a nominee for the Supreme Court. President Donald Trump, in a February comment, encouraged Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to take that approach, known as the so-called nuclear option, should the nomination be stalled with a filibuster.
Doing so would dramatically alter the rules of the Senate, Masket said, and could end up hurting Republicans in the Senate two years from now if they fare poorly during midterm elections and become the minority party again.
“There might be some hesitancy to getting rid of the filibuster,” Masket said. “But then again they might do so given how polarized the chamber has become. It’s hard to maintain a system like the filibuster where you give a minority party a lot of power in such a polarized environment.”