Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Judge Neil Gorsuch faces an “uphill climb” to overcome a Democratic filibuster he is leading and argued that Republicans will be solely to blame if they blow up Senate rules to seat him on the Supreme Court.
“[Senate Democrats] are going to do the right thing, and it will a real uphill climb for him to get those 60 votes,” Schumer told reporters after a closed-door meeting with his Democratic colleagues Tuesday afternoon.
The New York Democrat was referring to the 60 votes Gorsuch’s nomination needs to overcome a filibuster and move to a vote on final passage on the Senate floor.
Schumer is urging his Senate colleagues to support the filibuster and block Gorsuch’s nomination because he argues that Gorsuch wasn’t forthcoming during his confirmation hearings and seemed to have an almost “instinctive” tendency to side with special interests over the “average person.”
Republicans counter that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg set the standard of not disclosing positions on hypothetical cases or prior ones during Senate confirmation hearings. They also say Democrats cherry-picked Gorsuch decisions they believe showed him siding with corporations over employees and failed to disclose that Democratic-appointed judges had the same opinion as Gorsuch in some of the cases in question.
Vice President Mike Pence and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have said Gorsuch would be confirmed one way or another, a reference to McConnell’s willingness to change Senate rules to require only a simple, 51-vote majority to confirm high court nominees. McConnell, a Senate institutionalist, is reluctant to blow up the Senate rules and invoke the so-called “nuclear” option but has signaled he will do so if Democrats successfully filibuster Gorsuch.
Republicans argue that in 2013 then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., set the Senate on this path when he changed Senate rules to allow only a 51-vote majority for all presidential nominations except those to the high court.
But Schumer on Tuesday said McConnell can’t blame Democrats if he decides to go nuclear and change Senate precedent.
“Mitch McConnell is a free actor in this,” Schumer told reporters. “Just as we didn’t change the rules for the Supreme Court [in 2013], he doesn’t have to change the rules for the Supreme Court. If he does, it’s going to be on his shoulders, and only on his shoulders – and let’s not forget, he doesn’t come to the court, so to speak, with clean hands.”
He then blamed McConnell for blocking President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, for nearly a year.
“And now [he’s] complaining?” Schumer said. “That doesn’t really wash.”
