‘Unlikely Gorsuch can clear hurdle’
Fights nothing new
WASHINGTON, April 3, (Agencies): The top Democrat in the US Senate said on Sunday it was unlikely that Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch would be able to clear a procedural hurdle to a final vote, even as a third Senate Democrat threw support behind the pick.
Senator Joe Donnelly, a Democrat from Indiana, said he would vote in favor of Gorsuch, calling him in a statement a “qualified jurist who ... is well-respected among his peers.”
Donnelly joined Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota as the only Senate Democrats to announce support for President Donald Trump’s court pick. If confirmed to fill a vacancy created by the February 2016 death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, Gorsuch, 49, an appeals court judge, would restore the nineseat high court’s conservative majority, fulfilling one of Trump’s top campaign promises.
Most other Democrats have made their opposition clear and 37 senators have indicated support for a filibuster of the nomination, which would force Republicans to come up with 60 votes to move forward. Republicans control the Senate 52-48.
“It’s highly, highly unlikely that he’ll get to 60,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
On Sunday evening, Democratic Senator Jon Tester declared he would vote against Gorsuch. In a statement, the Montana lawmaker said Gorsuch was “smart” but added: “That doesn’t make him right for a lifetime appointment to the US Supreme Court.”
If the planned filibuster holds, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell would only be able to advance the nomination of Gorsuch by changing longstanding Senate rules so it could be approved by a simple majority.
McConnell, who also appeared on “Meet the Press,” declined to rule out that option, which the Republican president has urged, and vowed the Senate would confirm Gorsuch one way or another.
“What I can tell you is Neil Gorsuch will be confirmed this week. How that happens really depends on our Democratic friends,” he said.
The Senate Judiciary Committee was set to vote on the nomination on Monday, setting the stage for what McConnell has said will be a vote in the full Senate on Friday.
McConnell declined to say if he had sufficient support among his fellow Republicans to change the Senate’s rules.
Vote
In related news, a US Senate panel on Monday was expected to advance Gorsuch, to a full Senate vote later in the week, setting up a political showdown as Democrats seek to block his confirmation.
Republicans hold an 11-9 majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is considering Gorsuch’s nomination, and control the full Senate by 52-48. But Democrats are planning to use a procedural hurdle called a filibuster that requires 60 votes to allow a confirmation vote.
The Senate’s No. 2 Republican, John Cornyn, said on Sunday the expected filibuster was a “last-gasp” effort by Democrats.
“If they filibuster Neil Gorsuch, they are going to filibuster everyone that this president might propose,” Cornyn said on the CBS program “Face the Nation.”
Meanwhile, wondering when Supreme Court nominations became so politically contentious? Only about 222 years ago — when the Senate voted down George Washington’s choice for chief justice.
This year’s brouhaha sees Senate Democrats and Republicans bracing for a showdown over President Donald Trump’s nominee, Neil Gorsuch. It’s the latest twist in the political wrangling that has surrounded the high court vacancy almost from the moment Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016.
“We are in an era of extreme partisan energy right now,” said University of Georgia law professor Lori Ringhand. “In such a moment, the partisanship will manifest itself across government, and there’s no reason to think the nomination process will be exempt from that. It hasn’t been in the past,”
Each side has accused the other of unprecedented obstruction. Republicans wouldn’t even hold a hearing for Merrick Garland, president Barack Obama’s nominee. Democrats are threatening a filibuster, which takes 60 votes to overcome, to try to stop Gorsuch from becoming a justice. If they succeed, Republicans who control the Senate could change the rules and prevail with a simple majority vote in the 100-member body.
As she lays out in “Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings and Constitutional Change,” the book she co-wrote, Ringhand said, “There were more rejected nominees in the first half of the nation’s history than in the second half. That controversy has been partisan in many cases, back to George Washington.”
Controversial
“Confirmations have been episodically controversial,” said Ringhand, who is the Georgia law school’s associate dean. “The level of controversy has ebbed and flowed.”
John Rutledge, a South Carolinian who was a drafter of the Constitution, was the first to succumb to politics. The Senate confirmed Rutledge as a justice in 1789, a post he gave up a couple of years later to become South Carolina’s chief justice.
In 1795, Washington nominated Rutledge to replace John Jay as chief justice. By then, Rutledge had become an outspoken opponent of the Jay Treaty, which sought to reduce tensions with England. A year after ratifying the treaty, the Senate voted down Rutledge’s nomination.
The rejected chief justice was partly a victim of his own design. He was among the drafters who insisted Congress should have a role in the Supreme Court appointment process, rather than leave it solely to the president, historian Henry Abraham wrote in his history of high court appointments, “Justices, Presidents, and Senators.”
Rutledge was not the last to get close to the lifetime appointment to the court only to see it yanked away. The most recent were Garland and former White House counsel Harriet Miers, whose nomination by President George W. Bush was withdrawn under pressure from conservatives.