Democrats can’t seem to land a punch on Neil Gorsuch — and it’s not even clear they want to.
President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee has breezed through more than 70 meetings with senators. Opponents who’ve scoured his record have found little to latch onto. And some Democrats are privately beginning to believe that Gorsuch — barring a blunder at his Senate confirmation hearings next week — will clinch the 60 votes he needs to be approved without a filibuster.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York has been taking the temperature of the Senate Democratic Caucus but hasn’t begun whipping hard against Gorsuch, sources familiar with the matter said.
If the Dems let this through without a HUGE fight, they're basically saying it's OK that a seat on the SUPREME COURT was stolen.
“The only thing we’ve decided as a caucus is to ask members not to make any public commitments until the hearing phase is finished,” Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said.
Bullshit. There should be a public commitment, and it is "NO."
“There’s a fierce urgency at the grass roots that is not being echoed by the Senate Democrats,” said Ben Wikler, the Washington director for MoveOn, which joined 10 other groups in a letter urging Senate Democrats to, essentially, step it up. “The notion that Democrats should wait until after the hearings to speak their mind is a strategy to win a race by running hard in the last 30 seconds.”
Agreed. The Republicans waged war against Garland for nearly a year. REMINDER:
— Hywel ap Rees (@haprees) March 10, 2017
This shouldn't be difficult; Americans tend to understand hypocrisy when you point it out.
Maybe there's just too much coming from the tennis ball machine to focus on something that isn't in the public eye right now, but this is a fight for three decades of control of the judiciary.
Gorsuch has been studying up for his confirmation hearings before the Judiciary Committee, which are scheduled to begin Monday and are expected to last several days. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is aiming to hold a floor vote before the Senate leaves for its Easter recess, currently set to begin April 8.
That's three weeks from now. It's not like it's two years away. Three weeks from now, liberals (and really, Americans) could lose control of the Supreme Court for basically the rest of my life. Let's just say I'm less than OK with that.
Senate Democrats acknowledge the pressure from their base. But key influential players in the Gorsuch fight say it’s not their role to automatically reject the nominee.
That is EXACTLY their role right now. Automatically reject it as loudly as you can. Remind Americans this seat was stolen. Talk about Gorsuch's extreme record. Get discussions of Republicans needing to end the filibuster out into the open. Run ads of Republicans saying that they were going to block Obama nominees no matter what.
“Our job is to put together the hearing,” said California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. “Why have a hearing if everybody is going to take a position? … So to be talking about whether I’m for or against at this stage makes no sense at all to me because it’s uninformed.”
UNINFORMED? All you need to know is how Republicans behaved in 2016. That's it. End of story.
Time for some hippie-punching from the two remaining conservative Democrats in the Senate:
North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, a red-state Democrat up for reelection who’s under heavy pressure from conservatives and liberals on the Supreme Court decision, stressed that “we should be open to supporting any nominee.” As for liberals calling on her to oppose Gorsuch, she said: “I get pressure from the left all the time. I wasn’t sent here to respond to pressure.”
You were sent there to respond to pressure from your constituents. It's part of democracy. It's one of the reasons I came to really like Obama and Clinton -- they listened.
Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who’s in the same political predicament as Heitkamp, added that he is “truly and totally concerned” that a Democratic filibuster would prompt Republicans to do away with the 60-vote threshold for Supreme Court nominees. He is the only remaining Democrat to vote against the party’s rules change in 2013.
“You need nine members. It doesn’t work with eight,” Manchin said of the Supreme Court and Democrats who would deny Gorsuch a seat. “I understand the Democrats being so upset. I understand it. … That doesn’t make it right to go along with eight. If you think [Republicans] are going to give you a center-left [judge], they’re not! Come to grips with it.”
We've gone a whole year with eight. We've been fine. We're better off with the eight we have than another conservative. And I go back and forth on whether I'd be OKing with primarying Manchin and Heitkamp. This doesn't put me in their camp.
Menendez warned that the stance from outside groups for Democrats to be “reflexively no” on Gorsuch “works to put at risk the Republicans moving to change the rules and go to a simple 51” votes to confirm Supreme Court nominees.
You're not going to filibuster because you might not be able to filibuster later? That makes zero sense. If the Republicans don't take it away now, they automatically get what they want and they just get rid of the filibuster next time. What's the point of having it if you don't use it?
Democrats, too, may be more ready to fight by then. Preoccupied by the battle over repealing Obamacare and the brewing controversy over Russia’s meddling in the election, Democrats say they’re just getting started on Gorsuch.
“We’re strategizing,” Schumer insisted. “We’re just not telling you.”
Republicans told us, and it worked for them. I follow politics way too closely, and because the Dems haven't talked about this, I didn't even know what was going on. I've heard little to nothing from Democratic activists about this. If our leaders don't tell us, we don't know, and we can't do.
The Republicans are on their heels because of Trump's Putin stain. We need to keep pushing them backwards at every turn until they fall. Every victory they get makes them stronger, and conservatives think very few issues are more important than the Supreme Court.
So tie it together!
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