Democrats to filibuster Neil Gorsuch amid Supreme Court showdown!

Liz Goodwin

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Senate Judiciary Committee member Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., announces that he will be the 41st Democrat to vote against ending debate on the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — Forty-one Senate Democrats have announced they will filibuster President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, setting up a partisan showdown over the hidebound institution’s internal rules this week.

In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Monday afternoon, Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., became the latest Democrat to say he would vote no on cloture for Gorsuch. “I am not ready to end debate on this,” he said. The Committee voted Gorsuch’s nomination out to the floor Monday afternoon along party lines, with a full vote expected Friday.

Senate precedent requires 60 votes to end a filibuster — an indefinite debate — and proceed to a vote for Supreme Court nominees. That almost always means a judge has to attract some bipartisan support to be confirmed. In 2014, then-Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., lowered the old 60-vote bar for Cabinet nominees and federal judges, after Republicans blocked many of President Barack Obama’s nominees.

Now, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is likely to follow suit, and invoke the so-called nuclear option on Supreme Court nominees as well.

In announcing his opposition to Gorsuch, Coons said it would be “tragic” if Senate Republicans change the body’s rules to allow Supreme Court justices to go through with fewer than 60 votes. McConnell, however, has said if Democrats don’t allow Gorsuch’s nomination to go through, he would invoke the nuclear option. Though McConnell only needs a majority of senators to end the 60-vote threshold, it’s unclear if he has the votes at the moment. Some Republican senators have expressed dismay at the thought of changing the rules that forced the Senate into bipartisan compromises. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., told Bloomberg he feared the body would next eliminate the filibuster for legislation as well, letting partisan bills sail through on bare majorities — as they do in the rowdier House.

Both Republicans and Democrats on the Judiciary Committee lamented the end of an era when a majority of senators could agree on Supreme Court nominees as long as they were qualified and scandal-free. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia were confirmed almost unanimously, despite being on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum.

“We’re headed to a world where you need one person from the other side to pick a judge,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. said. “And what does that mean? That means judges who are more ideological, not less.”