How Senate GOP could ‘go nuclear’ for Gorsuch

Chamber’s rules may be changed on Supreme Court vote

WASHINGTON How, exactly, does the Senate go “nuclear”?

If Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch doesn’t get 60 votes later this week — the showdown will probably be Thursday — to overcome a Democratic filibuster of his nomination, Republican leaders will likely move quickly to change Senate rules to confirm him without the need for a single Democratic vote. Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., said Monday that he would vote against Gorsuch, becoming the 41st senator to oppose him and setting the stage for extreme action from Republicans.

The change is called the “nuclear option” because it blows up long-standing rules and bipartisanship in a chamber that has traditionally valued both.

It is also a complicated process that only a parliamentarian could love, the subject of two detailed 2013 reports by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, which helps members of Congress understand congressional procedures.

CRS based one of those reports, from Dec. 6, 2013, on action by former Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who used the nuclear option that year to change Senate rules so that lower-court judges and Cabinet nominees could be confirmed by a simple majority, scuttling a Republican filibuster. That move by Reid basically laid out a procedural road map that Republicans could now follow to get their way on Gorsuch.

The nuclear path appears to include nine steps senators would take before finally moving to an up-or-down vote to confirm Gorsuch as the new Supreme Court justice. Republicans could vary these steps a bit, but, based on what Reid did, here’s how it could go:

SUSAN WALSH (INSET) AND J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP

A weeklong partisan showdown is expected in the Senate as Democrats work to block Judge Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court confirmation and force Republicans to change long-standing rules to confirm him.