By Ed O’Keefe / The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — Democrats successfully blocked Judge Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court from advancing in the U.S. Senate on Thursday, sparking what is expected to be a bitter clash with Republicans over how the chamber confirms high court nominees.
Gorsuch failed to earn the 60 votes needed to end debate on his nomination. In response, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has vowed he will change Senate rules in order to confirm Gorsuch and all future Supreme Court nominees with a simple majority vote.
A final confirmation vote on Gorsuch is not scheduled until Friday, when 52 Republicans and at least three Democrats — from states won by President Donald Trump in last year’s election — are expected to vote to have him replace the late Antonin Scalia on the high court.
But the next 24 hours could be among the most bitter in recent Senate history.
“This will be the first and last partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court nomination,” McConnell vowed Thursday morning.
“The consequences for the Senate and for the future of the Supreme Court will be far-reaching,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., said before the vote, adding that the change “weakens the standing of the Senate” and its ability to help shape federal courts.
“The cooling saucer of the Senate will get considerably hotter,” Schumer warned.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, who chaired four days of confirmation hearings for Gorsuch, blasted Democrats before the vote for “desperately searching for justification for their preplanned filibuster.”
Walking into the chamber, Grassley told reporters he was confident that Republicans would end the filibuster and he blamed Democrats for putting the Senate on a “slippery slope” starting back in 2013.
That’s when Democrats made similar changes to Senate rules, punishing Republicans for blocking President Barack Obama’s nominees. The Democrats pushed through a revision to confirm all executive branch nominees and lower-court picks with a simple majority vote. But Democrats did not include the Supreme Court in the rules change, believing that lifetime appointments to the nation’s highest court should be handled differently.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., who grilled Gorsuch on campaign finance laws during the confirmation hearings, argued that no deal between the parties to keep a filibuster would prevent Republicans from jamming through a future nominee if the court’s balance was at stake.
Asked what he was thinking as he walked to the Senate floor, Whitehouse said one word: “Inevitability.”
Debate on Gorsuch’s nomination officially began Tuesday and was dominated into Wednesday by Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., one of the Senate’s most liberal members, who spoke overnight for more than 15 hours against Gorsuch.
Thursday’s showdown is expected to begin around 11 a.m., when senators will convene for a “cloture vote” – a special feature of Senate procedure that ends debate on a bill or nomination, allowing the process to move forward toward a final vote.
Sixty senators must agree for the debate to end. But with 44 Democrats vowing to vote no on cloture, Republicans are poised to fall short. That temporary victory for Democrats is expected to spark contentious procedural maneuvering.
McConnell is then expected to begin the process of ending the minority party’s ability to filibuster Supreme Court nominees. He is likely to raise a “point of order” to suggest that Gorsuch’s nomination could be advanced with a simple majority of votes rather than the usual 60.
The focus will suddenly turn toward the senator presiding over the chamber. That senator will rule against McConnell’s point of order because it contradicts current Senate rules.
Then will come the crucial moment.
McConnell will challenge the ruling of the chair by appealing it to the full Senate. In essence, he’ll be asking senators to vote on whether the rules should change – whether a simple majority of senators should be able to end debate on a Supreme Court nomination. No Republican has said they oppose McConnell’s decision, so the rules change is expected to pass along party lines.
Gorsuch’s confirmation was announced in late January and continued with three days of confirmation hearings that began March 20 in the Senate Judiciary Committee. While Gorsuch allies praised his demeanor, Democrats came away unsatisfied with his answers on issues they expected to come before the court.
“Gorsuch did himself no favors in that hearing,” said Ian Millhiser, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “He mansplained fairly basic concepts to women senators. He pushed way too hard on the, ‘I’m not going to express a view about anything, ever’ fallback – much harder than previous nominees. And then, after the Supreme Court unanimously overturned one of his opinions, he defended himself by misrepresenting his own opinion.”
After the hearing, just four Democrats announced that they would oppose a Gorsuch filibuster. Seven of the Democrats from Trump-won states opposed him, all comfortably couching their decision with the issues they expected him to rule on.
“With Judge Gorsuch on the bench, I am deeply concerned that dark money will continue to drown out the voices and votes of citizens,” said Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., whose state passed tough campaign finance laws that were struck down by a Republican-appointed judge.
Some Republicans say they could sense for months that Democrats were going to have the votes to block Gorsuch.
“I could count, sure,” said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. “But I had hoped that we could do what we had done in the past, and that was reach some agreement. And we haven’t, so it’s permanent damage to the body.”
Grassley said it became clear to him that Gorsuch was not going to have the 60 votes necessary to break a Democratic blockade “at the end of the questioning” during his confirmation hearing.
Republicans continued to sing Gorsuch’s praises ahead of the expected Thursday clash. Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., called Gorsuch “one of the finest judges our nation has to offer” and said he would uphold “justice, fairness and an interpretation of what the law is.”
A single-party filibuster has never successfully blocked a Supreme Court nomination. A bipartisan coalition used the procedural vote to defeat Abe Fortas’s 1968 nomination to be chief justice. After his marathon speech, Merkley admitted that he would have preferred that the parties come to a deal. But he saw partisan rancor coming from the other side.
“We labored for the better part of a year, working with our Republican colleagues. It wasn’t like what’s going on now,” he said. He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”
The Washington Post’s Sean Sullivan, Elise Viebeck, David Weigel and Kelsey Snell contributed to this report.
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