Senate Republicans on Thursday crushed a Democratic blockade of US President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee in a fierce partisan brawl, approving a rule change dubbed the “nuclear option” to allow for conservative judge Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation by yesterday.
With ideological control of the country’s highest court at stake, the Republican-led Senate voted 52 to 48 along party lines to change its long-standing rules in order to prohibit a procedural tactic called a filibuster against Supreme Court nominees.
That came after Republicans failed by a 55-45 tally to muster the 60-vote super-majority needed to end the Democratic filibuster that had sought to deny Gorsuch confirmation to the lifetime post.
The Senate’s action cleared the way to confirm Gorsuch by simple majority yesterday, with a final vote expected by late morning.
Republicans control the Senate 52-48. The rule change was called the “nuclear option” because it was considered an extreme break with Senate tradition.
Trump had encouraged Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to “go nuclear.”
Confirmation of Gorsuch would represent Trump’s first major victory since taking office, after setbacks on healthcare legislation and the blocking of his order that sought to ban travelers from several Muslim-majority countries from entering the US.
Senate confirmation of Gorsuch, a Colorado-based federal appeals could judge, would restore the nine-seat court’s five to four conservative majority, enable Trump to leave an indelible mark on the US’ highest judicial body and fulfill a top campaign promise.
Gorsuch, 49, could be expected to serve for decades.
“This will be the first and last partisan filibuster of the Supreme Court,” McConnell said on the Senate floor, accusing Democrats of trying to inflict political damage on Trump and to keep more conservatives from joining the high court.
“In 20 or 30 or 40 years, we will sadly point to today as a turning point in the history of the Senate and the Supreme Court, a day when we irrevocably moved further away from the principles our founders intended for these institutions: principles of bipartisanship, moderation and consensus,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor.
Schumer ridiculed McConnell’s contention that the Democratic action was unprecedented. He said that the Republican-led Senate refused last year to consider former US president Barack Obama’s nomination of appellate judge Merrick Garland for the same seat.
With three of the court’s justices 78 or older, Trump told reporters he hoped to appoint as many as four Supreme Court justices, a move likely to make it overwhelmingly conservative.
A 60-vote threshold giving the minority party power to hold up the majority party has forced the Senate over the decades to try to achieve bipartisanship in legislation and presidential appointments.
In the final procedural vote that paved the way for confirmation, three Democratic senators up for re-election in 2018 in states won by Trump last year — Indiana’s Joe Donnelly, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp — broke with their party and voted with Republicans to bring about a confirmation vote, although they opposed the rule change.
A fourth Democrat, Michael Bennet, who represents Colorado, voted with Republicans on Thursday’s first procedural vote to bring debate to a close, but he stuck with fellow Democrats in opposing the final vote to end the filibuster, the one that succeeded following the rule change.
“The nuclear option was used by Senator McConnell when he stopped Merrick Garland,” Democratic Senator Richard Durbin said on the Senate floor. “What we face today is the fallout.”
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