At least one Senate Democrat plans to sit down with President Trump’s Supreme Court pick before moving to block his or her nomination, a departure from Democratic party leaders who have vowed to disrupt the confirmation process no matter who Trump picks.
Hours before Trump was expected to announce his pick on Tuesday, a spokesman for Sen. Joe Manchin said he “plans to meet with the nominee and evaluate their qualifications and judicial philosophy” before making any decision to support or oppose their nomination.
“I’ll meet with whoever, whether I eventually end up supporting or being opposed to them,” Manchin told the Washington Examiner. Any sit-down, he added, would be “out of a decent respect for the whole process.”
The conservative West Virginia Democrat, who is up for re-election in 2018, was once rumored to be under consideration for a position in Trump’s administration but has since become the de facto liasion between members of his own party in the Senate and their Republican counterparts. He supported a number of the president’s Cabinet appointees and said he plans to stick to a simple test to determine if he will also back his Supreme Court nominee.
“If they’ve been basically following the rule of the law and the Constitution and they’re not going to basically invoke their own personal beliefs — those will be things I’m going to be looking for,” Manchin explained.
He described such a candidate as “a mainstream type [who is] going to be making decisions based on the law and not on their own opinion.”
Trump, who will announce his pick at 8 p.m. Tuesday evening, is rumored to be leaning toward U.S. appeals court judge Neil Gorsuch, 49, to fill the seat left vacant when Justice Antonin Scalia died last February. The Denver-based Bush appointee clerked for two Supreme Court justices before joining the Justice Department for several years, and was a classmate of former President Obama at Harvard Law.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters on Tuesday that he is confident the administration can get enough Democrats to support Trump’s Supreme Court nominee even if they dislike “their political or philosophical background.”
“I think the criteria in terms of academia background, time on the bench – the expertise and criteria meets the demand of both Republican and Democrats,” he said.
As soon as Trump names his choice, the nomination will move to the Senate Judiciary Committee where Democrats currently lack enough members to block it from proceeding to a full Senate vote. At that point, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., has said Democrats “will use every lever in our power to stop” the president’s nominee from being confirmed.
