Another veteran Republican senator is ready to thwart an unprecedented filibuster of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch.
“We are going to confirm Judge Gorsuch. By whatever means necessary,” Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah told THE WEEKLY STANDARD on Tuesday. The 83-year-old Hatch has been serving in the Senate since 1977 and is widely recognized as an establishment Republican who has taken in an interest in defending the Senate as an institution.
Several other GOP Senate institutionalists indicated last week that they would not allow a minority of 41 or more Democrats to stop Gorsuch from taking a seat on the Supreme Court. “Whatever it takes to get him on the court, I will do,” said South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham. “None of us want to do it, but we’re going to confirm Gorsuch,” said Arizona’s John McCain.
McCain and Graham are two of the three remaining senators who were part of the “Gang of 14,” a bipartisan group that struck a deal to keep the filibuster for federal judges and executive branch appointees in 2005. Susan Collins of Maine, the third remaining senator from the Gang of 14, spoke on the Senate floor in support of Gorsuch’s confirmation on Tuesday. “The Senate should resist the temptation to filibuster a Supreme Court nominee who is unquestionably qualified,” said Collins, the most liberal member of the Senate GOP caucus. She did not say what the Senate majority should do if Democrats filibuster Gorsuch.
In 2013, just eight years after the Gang of 14’s deal, a simple majority of Senate Democrats abolished the filibuster for federal judges and executive branch nominees, a rules change sometimes known as the “nuclear option.” The 2013 rules change didn’t explicitly affect Supreme Court nominees, but last October former Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid said his party would confirm a Supreme Court nominee with a simple majority if they won the Senate and White House.
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer has been urging his Democratic colleagues to filibuster Gorsuch in order to get a more liberal nominee to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant following Antonin Scalia’s death.
As William Kristol wrote in THE WEEKLY STANDARD following Gorsuch’s nomination, the filibuster has never before been used to block an ethical nominee from taking a seat on the Supreme Court: “Republican senators have taken an oath to support and defend the Constitution, and they have an obligation to confirm Supreme Court justices who would do the same. If they fail to exercise their constitutional authority to confirm Gorsuch out of deference to a Senate rule that has never been used to block a qualified Supreme Court nominee—a rule that we know Democrats would eliminate if the tables were turned—they will make Chuck Schumer happier. But they will have failed the country and the Constitution.”
