Progressive activists didn’t think much of Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama’s choice to replace the late Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. He was too middle of the road, they thought, too acceptable to Republicans.
But GOP senators did not accept him. They blocked a vote on his nomination for months in the hope that a Republican would replace Obama in the November election and choose a down-the-line conservative for the open court seat. Now a Republican — President Donald Trump — has taken over the White House, and he’s selected Neil Gorsuch, a federal judge the well-regarded SCOTUSblog calls a “natural successor to Justice Antonin Scalia … both in terms of his judicial style and his substantive approach.”
Progressives’ response: Remember Garland!
They don’t want Democrats to allow Gorsuch an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor. It doesn’t matter to them that there are Democratic senators in red states who face tough re-election campaigns next year. It doesn’t matter to them that full-on opposition to Gorsuch could result in Republicans nuking the filibuster, giving the Democrats no meaningful way to block legislation during Trump’s term.
They want Democratic senators to prove they’re all true-believer Trump opponents just like them.
Here’s Ilya Sheyman, MoveOn.org Political Action’s executive director:
The coming fight over Trump’s nominee is fundamentally a choicepoint: Will Trump’s policies of destruction be pursued for one term, or will they be enshrined into our nation for a lifetime?
Democrats must be clear: President Trump is not a run-of-the-mill threat. He threatens the fabric of our democracy, our security, and our people. And while too many Democrats in the Senate continue to use the old, more traditional playbook, Donald Trump and the GOP have ripped up the playbook and are playing by their own destructive rules.
Now is not the time for business as usual or playing by the same rules of the past. Senate Democrats must use every procedural tool available to them to shut down the Senate and block Trump’s attempts to fill the Supreme Court seat that Republicans stole by filibustering for nearly a year.
Charles Chamberlain, executive director of Democracy Vdcasino for America, goes even further.
“We want to see our leaders in Congress standing up as strongly to the Trump administration as we are in the streets and in airports across the country,” he said Tuesday. “Anything less than a complete and utter rejection of Trump’s Cabinet appointees and of their Supreme Court appointees is absolutely unacceptable.”
He added: “The Democratic base right now is reading the news and watching the country slide away from democracy. Senate Democrats have just a few places of leverage to push back against that — and this may be one of them.”
Will progressive hardliners get their wish? Oregon’s Democrats in Congress, it seems, are ready for such a fight. “I encourage my Senate colleagues to give Neil Gorsuch the same courtesy Senate Republicans gave Merrick Garland,” Congressman Earl Blumenauer wrote on Facebook.
Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley is planning to do just that, promising a filibuster on the Gorsuch nomination.
“This is the first time in American history that one party has blockaded a nominee for almost a year in order to deliver a seat to a President of their own party,” Merkley wrote on his website. “If this tactic is rewarded rather than resisted, it will set a dangerous new precedent in American governance. … This is a stolen seat being filled by an illegitimate and extreme nominee, and I will do everything in my power to stand up against this assault on the Court.”
Right now, it seems likely that many Democrats in the Senate will not follow Merkley’s lead and will support hearings and a vote for Gorsuch. This could set off a very public battle between the centrist and progressive wings of the party, perhaps resulting in the party going through the kind of populist awakening that roiled the GOP during Trump’s rise last year — and pushing partisanship to even greater extremes.
— Douglas Perry
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
