WASHINGTON -- The Judiciary Committee voted 11-9 Monday, along party lines, to recommend President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, to the full Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has vowed he will be confirmed on Friday.
Democrats, however, claimed the votes they needed to block the nominee, setting up a showdown with Republicans who intend to rewrite Senate rules and muscle Gorsuch onto the high court.
Short of the 60 votes needed to overcome procedural hurdles, McConnell is ready to lead Republicans in a unilateral voting change so significant in the rules-conscious Congress that it's been dubbed the nuclear option, lowering the confirmation threshold to a simple majority in the 100-member Senate.
Democratic opposition to Gorsuch has been building for days, and four more senators announced on Monday that they would vote against him and support a filibuster of his nomination. That gave Democrats the requisite 41 votes to put up a roadblock and compel Trump and Senate Republicans to either withdraw Gorsuch's nomination or change Senate procedure.
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"This is a new low," McConnell said in response to the Democratic opposition.
Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.; Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.; Christopher Coons D-Del.; and Mark Warner, D-Va. indicated on Monday that they would oppose Gorsuch and vote against cloture -- or the motion to end a filibuster that is required to hold a final up-or-down confirmation vote.
Coons became the key 41st vote for the Democrats, declaring during committee debate that Gorsuch's conservative record showed an activist approach to the law and that he evaded questions during his confirmation hearings. Coons also said that Republicans' treatment of former President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, left lasting scars after they denied him so much as a hearing after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia early last year.
"We are at a historic moment in the history of the United States Senate" due to actions by both parties, Coons said. "We have eroded the process for reaching agreement and dishonored our long traditions of acting above partisanship."
The long-term consequences of the coming confrontation would be profound, as the rules change Republicans intend to enact would apply to future Supreme Court nominees, too, allowing them to be voted onto the court without any input from the minority party. And though predicting a justice's votes can be difficult, confirmation of the 49-year-old Gorsuch is expected to restore the conservative majority that existed while Scalia was alive, which could then be in place or even expand over decades to come as some of the more liberal justices age.
In remarks during the Judiciary Committee meeting Monday, panel Chairman Charles Grassley of Iowa said Democrats' efforts to find fault with Gorsuch "will not stick."
"His record on the bench has shown the judge falls well into the mainstream," Grassley said. "You wonder what the uproar about him is all about."
The panel's top Democrat, Feinstein, said she "cannot support this nomination" because in some rulings he "went out of his way to imply his own view of what the law should be even when it would have devastating effects on people's lives."
She said his answers to the committee's questions were unclear "even on big and long-settled cases."
GOP count at 55
Gorsuch will be confirmed "and he should be," the No. 2 Senate Republican, John Cornyn of Texas, said during Monday's debate. "If Judge Gorsuch is unacceptable to our Democratic colleagues, there will never be a nominee by this president that you will find acceptable. Never."
Arkansas' U.S. senators, both Republicans, agreed.
"If Democrats will filibuster Neil Gorsuch, then they will filibuster any Republican nominee. Such a double standard is unacceptable. Nominees ought to receive an up-or-down, simple-majority vote," Sen. Tom Cotton through his spokesman, Caroline Rabbitt.
Sen. John Boozman said through a spokesman: "I met with Judge Gorsuch last week. He checks every box and is eminently qualified. It's disappointing to see Senate Democrats plan to play politics and filibuster his nomination, but we intend to get him confirmed."
Gorsuch now counts 55 supporters in the Senate: the 52 Republicans, along with three moderate Democrats from states Trump won last November -- Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Joe Donnelly of Indiana. A fourth Senate Democrat, Michael Bennet from Gorsuch's home state of Colorado, has said he will not join in the filibuster against Gorsuch but has not said how he will vote on final passage.
Democrats claim the Republicans' treatment of Garland was worse than anything they ever did or are doing, and with Trump in the White House they are under intense pressure from liberal voters to oppose the president on every front. That gives them very little leeway to let Gorsuch onto the court unchallenged, even though all the current justices were confirmed without filibusters, aside from a failed effort against Justice Samuel Alito.
Several Democrats also say Gorsuch has not done enough to demonstrate his independence from Trump at a time when the president has frequently assailed the judiciary and is embroiled in one controversy after another.
"The independence of our judicial branch has never been more threatened or more important," said Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. "The possibility of the Supreme Court needing to enforce a subpoena against the president of the United States is far from idle speculation."
Gorsuch was nominated by Trump on Jan. 31 and spent weeks privately meeting with senators and preparing for his confirmation hearing. He was questioned by the Judiciary Committee last month for almost 20 hours over three days, answering nearly 1,200 questions and later sending about 70 pages of answers to written follow-up questions, according to a team of White House officials assisting with his nomination.
As of Friday, Gorsuch had met with 78 senators -- all but some of the most conservative and liberal lawmakers whose votes are likely to be along party lines. But three first-term Democratic senators, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Kamala Harris of California, complained that they were unable to get a face-to-face meeting with the nominee or offered the opportunity.
Gorsuch aides insisted privately that difficulties scheduling time with the senators was the only reason they never met.
Bracing for showdown
The showdown over the nuclear option, expected on the Senate floor Thursday, has prompted senators to bemoan the decay of the chamber's traditions of bipartisanship and comity.
The Senate is "headed to a world where you don't need one person from the other side to pick a judge," warned Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. "And what does that mean? That means the judges are going to be more ideological, not less. It means that every Senate seat is going to be a referendum on the Supreme Court ... The damage done to the Senate is going to be real."
When Democrats were in the majority, they removed the 60-vote threshold for lower-court nominees in 2013 when Republicans were blocking Obama picks to a critical federal court. Republicans said then that Democrats would come to regret it.
During the hourslong Judiciary Committee hearing, Leahy, the longest-serving member on the panel, criticized Gorsuch's answers during his marathon confirmation hearing as "excruciatingly evasive." He said that a GOP move to end filibusters of Supreme Court nominees would damage the Senate but argued that he had to vote his conscience, even if it pushes Republicans to change the rules.
"I cannot vote solely to protect an institution when the rights of hard-working Americans are at risk," he said, "because I fear that the Senate I would be defending no longer exists."
Cornyn shot back, blaming Democrats for years of partisan bickering over judicial nominees that they say started when President George W. Bush made several nominations for federal court vacancies earlier this century.
"I disagree with those who somehow say this is the end of the Senate as we know it," Cornyn said. "This is a restoration of the status quo ante before our Democratic colleagues directed this artificial 60-vote requirement."
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., dismissed Republican attempts to blame Democrats for the change.
"I'm sure we could trace it all the way back to the Hamilton-Burr duel," he said.
"The answer isn't to change the rules," he added. "The answer is to change the nominee."
Information for this article was contributed by Erica Werner and Mary Clare Jalonick of The Associated Press; by Frank E. Lockwood of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette; by Elise Viebeck, Ed O'Keefe and Amber Phillips of The Washington Post; and by Laura Litvan, Steven T. Dennis and Greg Sullivan of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 04/04/2017