Dems vow to filibuster Neil Gorsuch confirmation.
Move could complicate judge’s confirmation to Supreme Court
WASHINGTON — Judge Neil Gorsuch, President Donald Trump’s pick to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, faced a critical blow on Thursday as Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said he would join with other Democrats in attempting to filibuster the nomination — a move that could complicate his confirmation and lead to a total revamp of how the U.S. Senate conducts its business.
Since last year’s elections, Democrats have threatened to force Trump’s Supreme Court nominees to clear procedural hurdles requiring at least 60 senators to vote to end debate and proceed to a confirmation vote. Republicans are eager to confirm Gorsuch before an Easter recess next month, but with no Democrat expressing support for Gorsuch, they are threatening to change Senate rules to ensure the judge’s swift confirmation by allowing Supreme Court picks to be confirmed with a simple majority vote.
On Thursday, Schumer warned that they should focus instead on changing Trump’s nominee.
“If this nominee cannot earn 60 votes — a bar met by each of President Obama’s nominees, and George Bush’s last two nominees — the answer isn’t to change the rules. It’s to change the nominee,” he said.
Among recent Supreme Court nominees, President Barack Obama’s choices of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan each received more than 60 votes. Samuel Alito, chosen by President George W. Bush, was confirmed 5842 in 2006, but 72 senators voted to defeat a possible filibuster.
It is not clear that Democrats have the votes to block Gorsuch and to keep Republicans from changing the chamber’s way of doing business. But Schumer’s announcement is likely to further politicize an already divided Congress. In the last 47 years of Supreme Court nominations — spanning the appointments of the 16 most recent justices — only Alito was forced to clear the 60-vote procedural hurdle to break a filibuster.
In a Senate floor speech, Schumer said that Gorsuch “was unable to sufficiently convince me that he’d be an independent check” on Trump. He said later that the judge is “not a neutral legal mind but someone with a deep-seated conservative ideology. He was groomed by the Federalist Society and has shown not one inch of difference between his views and theirs.”
The Federalist Society, a conservative legal group, was one of two organizations that provided a list of names to Trump to consider for his Supreme Court nomination. One of the group’s top leaders, Leonard Leo, is on leave from the organization as he advises Trump on the Supreme Court confirmation process and other picks to fill vacancies on the federal appeals courts.
In addition to Schumer, Sens. Thomas Carper, DDel., and Robert Casey, D-Pa., also announced on Thursday that they would filibuster Gorsuch. Both are up for re-election next year. Casey is one of 10 Democratic senators running next year from states that Trump won in the presidential election and who are being pushed by Republicans to work with them on the president’s priorities.
Senior Republicans have vowed that Gorsuch will be confirmed no matter what — a veiled threat to Democrats that they might use the so-called nuclear option to change the way senators confirm Supreme Court justices.