The progressive grassroots is taking issue.
A story published in Politico on Tuesday highlights the frustrations of left-leaning interests and the resistance they’re facing from key Senate Democrats, who could give their Republican counterparts sufficient numbers to push Gorsuch beyond a 60-vote procedural threshold:
“There’s a fierce urgency at the grass roots that is not being echoed by the Senate Democrats,” said Ben Wikler, the Washington director for MoveOn, which joined 10 other groups in a letter urging Senate Democrats to, essentially, step it up. “The notion that Democrats should wait until after the hearings to speak their mind is a strategy to win a race by running hard in the last 30 seconds.” Senate Democrats acknowledge the pressure from their base. But key influential players in the Gorsuch fight say it’s not their role to automatically reject the nominee. “Our job is to put together the hearing,” said California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. “Why have a hearing if everybody is going to take a position? … So to be talking about whether I’m for or against at this stage makes no sense at all to me because it’s uninformed.”
Gorsuch, as THE WEEKLY STANDARD reported last month, appears to pass Feinstein’s “moral turpitude” test for blocking nominees, a term she used 11 years ago during the consideration of Samuel Alito to take a seat on the High Court. She described Gorsuch recently as “a very caring person” and “obviously very legally smart.”
Here’s a kicker from a red-state Democrat:
North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, a red-state Democrat up for reelection who’s under heavy pressure from conservatives and liberals on the Supreme Court decision, stressed that “we should be open to supporting any nominee.” As for liberals calling on her to oppose Gorsuch, she said: “I get pressure from the left all the time. I wasn’t sent here to respond to pressure.”
More from Politico here.
