On Thursday, Republicans pushed the nuke button on its Supreme Court pick Judge Neil Gorsuch, changing the filibuster rules to ban blocking future candidates and fast-tracking Gorsuch’s confirmation by Friday.
“The rule change means Gorsuch and all future Supreme Court nominees can be confirmed with a simple majority vote and will no longer face a 60-vote hurdle,” reports Bloomberg.
As The Washington Times notes, “After weeks of threatening, Democrats mounted the first successful partisan filibuster of a high court nominee in U.S. history, and Republicans — following a script Democrats pioneered four years ago — retaliated by changing the rules and eliminating the power of the filibuster to hold up any nominees.”
“It’s a fight they have waged for decades with a singular aim, securing raw power no matter the cost to the country or the institution,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. “It underlies why this threatened filibuster cannot be allowed to succeed."
“This will be the first — and last — partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court nomination,” he promised.
Opposing both the nuclear option and Gorsuch himself, Democrat Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said, “When history weighs what happened, the responsibility for changing the rules will fall on the Republicans and Leader McConnell’s shoulders. No one forced them to act; they acted with free will. We offered them alternatives; they refused.”
“The more we learned about Judge Gorsuch’s record, the more we didn’t like,” he added.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va) decried both sides of the aisle, “Their shifting positions and hypocrisy is the one thing that unites them. Both times, it was simply about doing what was politically easy instead of doing the hard work of consensus building. This is precisely what is wrong with Washington.”
Manchin voted against using the nuclear option for his party back in 2013, as he did this time.
Republican Utah Sen. Orrin G. Hatch said he didn’t see why Democrats “made such a fuss” about Gorsuch. But he is sure that on the next nomination of a SCOTUS justice, he expects “Armageddon.”
