Senate Democrats delayed a committee vote Monday on Supreme Court nominee Judge Neil Gorsuch to next week, with the top Democrat on the judicial panel citing the failed appointment of Merrick Garland, interest-group spending in support of Gorsuch, and the jurist’s answers about past High Court decisions during his confirmation hearing last week as a trio of issues of concern to the minority.
“I just want to say these three things more or less sort of [set] the table for at least the way this senator feels about this,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein at a meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee early Monday afternoon.
“This puts this side, in my view, in just a terrible position, and when you have this kind of dark money—you have reportedly 10 states targeted and millions spent—it creates a situation, I think, for a nominee that the people who spend this money by the tens of millions ought to think twice about [how] it may very well be counterproductive.”
Any committee member may hold over a nominee the first time the person is on the panel’s agenda. The Democrats pushed back Gorsuch and two other individuals under the group’s consideration, Rachel Brand as associate attorney general and Rod Rosenstein as deputy attorney general.
Committee chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley praised Gorsuch’s appearance before his panel last week in a brief statement.
“Before the hearing started, we all knew how qualified the judge is. His resume speaks for itself, but last week we got to see up close how thoughtful, how articulate, and how humble he is,” Grassley said. “He’s clearly committed to being a fair and impartial judge. And he isn’t willing to compromise his independence to win votes in the Senate.”
Despite the generally favorable reviews of the nominee’s performance, he still faces the prospect of a Democratic filibuster. A handful of senators, spearheaded by minority leader Sen. Chuck Schumer, have called for Gorsuch to meet a 60-vote standard—the number of yeas a Supreme Court appointment must receive to end debate on the nomination, but more than the simple majority required for confirmation. “If you seek to become a justice of the Supreme Court … you ought to be able to rack up 60 votes,” Pennsylvania senator Bob Casey said on a press call last week. There is a possibility some Democrats would want to advance Gorsuch, but not vote to confirm him.
In a sign of the procedural complication, Sen. Chris Coons said Monday morning that Gorsuch will “get an up-or-down vote”—the general phrase for a final, not procedural, vote—but also predicted the judge would fall short of the 60 votes needed to cut off debate. “The question then becomes what do we do? There’s a lot of finger-pointing. There’s a lot of Democrats justifiably still very mad about the treatment of Merrick Garland,” Coons said on Morning Joe. He said Republicans would “almost certainly” invoke the “tragic” option of rewriting Senate rules to allow Gorsuch to clear the 60-vote procedural hurdle with only 51 votes, which Democrats previously did for lower-court nominees.
The majority of the Democratic caucus is publicly uncommitted to how they’ll proceed on the nomination. Sen. Joe Manchin is the only one on-record who is opposed to a filibuster. Sen. Patrick Leahy, an outspoken senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, tweeted Monday he is “never inclined to filibuster a SCOTUS [nomination],” but that he also needed to see how Gorsuch will respond to written questions before deciding.
With Gorsuch’s committee vote pushed to next Monday, the GOP would have just one legislative week to meet the goal of confirming the judge before the upper chamber breaks for its Easter recess.
