Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee

The Senate voted to confirm Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court Friday — though they couldn’t have done it without triggering the “nuclear option” the day before, which allowed his nomination to advance with a simple majority.

That’s because, on Thursday, Democrats voted to filibuster Gorsuch’s nomination, and Republicans couldn’t come up with the necessary 60 votes to overcome that filibuster. If Senate rules were adhered to, Gorsuch’s nomination would have been blocked right there.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer appears to have secured support from 40 fellow Democrats for a filibuster of Judge Neil Gorsuch. That marks a short-term victory for Schumer in his bid to block Gorsuch’s nomination.

In the long term, though, we think it will prove to be a strategic blunder, making it easier for President Donald Trump to fill a future Supreme Court vacancy with a conservative justice who will swing the balance on issues such as abortion, LGBTQ rights, and affirmative action.

Senate Democrats have the 41 votes they need to filibuster Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch.

On Monday afternoon, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) told reporters that he would be joining the Democratic filibuster against Gorsuch’s nomination.

Claire McCaskill, a Democrat representing the red state of Missouri, announced today that she intends to join the more liberal members of the Senate in filibustering Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to fill the Supreme Court seat that has been vacant since Justice Antonin Scalia’s death.

She cites a “rigid ideology that always puts the little guy under the boot of corporations.”

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) has a message for his Democratic colleagues in the Senate: Don’t let Mitch McConnell fool you.

On Wednesday afternoon, Politico reported that a handful of Senate Democrats are considering cutting a deal with the Republican majority leader to let Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, through the Senate.

It’s official: Senate Democrats are going to try to filibuster Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer stated in a Senate floor speech that Gorsuch “almost instinctively favors the powerful over the weak,” and is “not a neutral legal mind but someone with a deep-seated conservative ideology.”

Senate Democrats have a lot of reasons to reject Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee.

He is a down-the-line conservative. He was appointed to a federal appeals court by George W. Bush, wrote a book arguing that judges should embrace an absolute right-to-life principle in assisted suicide cases, and has backed religious challenges to the Affordable Care Act (including in the Hobby Lobby case). He sided with corporations and against workers in a variety of cases, including one in which a Kansas State professor was fired for requesting more leave after a cancer diagnosis, and one involving a truck driver who was fired for abandoning his malfunctioning truck after waiting in a freezing, unheated cabin for three hours.

During his confirmation hearing Tuesday, Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch denied allegations by two of his former law students that he made sexist remarks about women in the workplace.

A former student said Gorsuch said in a legal ethics class that “many” women lawyers lie about whether they plan to have children to abuse maternity benefits — and that their companies should ask about such plans to protect themselves. The remarks have become an attack for Democrats opposed to the Tenth Circuit Court judge’s nomination, particularly because Gorsuch, like many would-be justices, doesn’t have a long track record of public opinions on controversial issues.

When Antonin Scalia’s death was announced, Neil Gorsuch was on the ski slope. Checking his phone halfway down the hill, tears welled up as he read the news, he has said. According to Gorsuch, who is President Trump’s nominee to replace Scalia on the Supreme Court, Scalia was “a lion of the law” whose judicial philosophy was exactly right: A judge must apply the law as it is, and never as the judge prefers it to be.

But at the same time, Gorsuch is a disciple of the natural law theorist John Finnis, who directed the doctoral work he began at Oxford after graduating from Harvard Law School. According to the natural law tradition, we must sometimes consult our understanding of morality before we can know what the law actually is. So on this view, judges may have to appeal to their own beliefs about morality to decide on a case.

Just before 7 am this morning, President Donald Trump decided to launch an attack on Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a low-key liberal Democrat with a safe seat who committed the crime of praising Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, appellate Judge Neil Gorsuch.

Specifically, Blumenthal told the Wall Street Journal that he had discussed some of Trump’s attacks on the federal judiciary with Gorsuch, and Gorsuch told him that the attacks “were demoralizing and disheartening — those were his words.”

Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch privately told a Democratic senator that President Donald Trump’s recent attacks on judicial independence were “demoralizing” and “disheartening,” according to multiple reports.

The senator, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, told reporters about Gorsuch’s comments in a conference call Wednesday. “He said [the attacks] were demoralizing and disheartening—those were his words,” Blumenthal said, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Beth Reinhard. “I believe he has an obligation to make his views known more explicitly and unequivocally to the American people.”

Neil Gorsuch has not publicly stated whether or not he thinks Roe v. Wade was correctly decided. But if you read his one published book, The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia, his position on right-to-life issues becomes exceptionally clear, and it’s not particularly difficult to infer what they imply for his thinking on abortion.

Gorsuch’s core argument in the book is that the US should “retain existing law [banning assisted suicide and euthanasia] on the basis that human life is fundamentally and inherently valuable, and that the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.” The “private persons” bit there is telling — Gorsuch elaborates, “I do not seek to address publicly authorized forms of killing like capital punishment and war.”

The problem with Neil Gorsuch’s nomination for the Supreme Court is not Neil Gorsuch. He is, by all accounts, a brilliant jurist and a kind man. But he is an extremely conservative judge at a moment when an extremely conservative judge makes a mockery of the popular will. For the good of the country and the Court, this moment demands a compromise nominee, and Gorsuch is not that.

Antonin Scalia’s seat came open under a Democratic president and a Republican Senate. This should have led to a centrist nominee. And President Barack Obama tried to offer one: Merrick Garland, who had previously been suggested for the Court by Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch. Republicans did not oppose Garland. They refused to consider him, or anyone else, for the opening. They insisted that no opening on the Court could be filled in an election year — an absurd faux principle which implies that vacancies on the Court must be left unfilled fully 50 percent of the time.

I don’t fancy myself a brilliant legislative tactician, and game theory was never my strongest subject. So take all this with that in mind. But here are some thoughts and suggestions for how Democrats in the Senate, and more broadly, might approach the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

Now, I’m speaking of Senate Democrats above as a cohesive party, and that’s not necessarily accurate. They could mostly agree on an approach, but if they have enough defections, with moderate Democrats going on TV to complain about how the liberals have hijacked the party, that would undermine any obstructionist strategy they have in mind.

President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, is something of a black box when it comes to abortion rights.

It seems much more likely than not that he personally opposes abortion. He supports the kind of expansive religious liberty protections that can sometimes interfere with reproductive and other civil rights. He was one of the original judges on the 2013 Hobby Lobby case, which expanded the right of religious employers to limit their employees’ access to birth control coverage, before the case went to the Supreme Court. He opposes legal euthanasia due to his belief in the sanctity of all human life.

By naming Neil Gorsuch as his nominee to the Supreme Court on Tuesday night — in primetime, with his top two finalists reportedly both summoned to Washington to increase suspense — President Donald Trump took his first step in a process that will ensure his influence lingers in the US for decades.

He also set up a political fight that, after the chaos of the past week, feels familiar: Gorsuch will need 60 votes for confirmation. The left is demanding that Democrats do whatever they can to block Gorsuch’s nomination, in part in response to Republicans’ refusal to even consider Merrick Garland for the past 10 months. But any attempt to filibuster is likely to encourage Republicans to eliminate the filibuster altogether.

President Donald Trump repeatedly promised on the campaign trail that he would pick a “pro-life” Supreme Court justice.

Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch as his Supreme Court nominee on Tuesday night. Gorsuch is, without a doubt, a respected conservative jurist. But when it comes to abortion rights, specifically, Gorsuch’s record is minimal. He’s never ruled on a case hinging on the constitutionality of abortion restriction. So the best way to look at his views is to look at how he’s thought about birth control and about assisted suicide. Together, it appears he is more likely pro-life than pro-choice.

Earlier this week, David Brooks wrote that Republicans and conservatives had made “a Faustian bargain with Donald Trump,” agreeing to tolerate all the things they may privately find disturbing about the president in return for the chance to score major wins on some of their key issues.

With the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, Trump has begun delivering on his part of the bargain — and even those on the right who often criticized Trump during the campaign are beside themselves with joy.

Late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and his would-be successor Neil Gorsuch don’t have a lot in common with Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama’s unsuccessful nominee for the same seat. But all three do share one thing: They went to Harvard Law School.

Indeed, if confirmed, Gorsuch would return the Court to its Scalia-era 6-3 majority of Harvard Law alums, and a 5-4 majority of Harvard Law graduates (Ruth Bader Ginsburg transferred from Harvard and graduated from Columbia Law). In case you were worried about the three-person minority that didn’t go to Harvard, fear not: All three went to Yale Law.

Hirings at SCOTUS and firings at DOJ.

Muslim American women answer basic questions about the head covering — like whether you wear one during sex. [YouTube / Joshua Seftel]

Update: Trump announced that he will nominate Judge Neil Gorsuch for the position.

Original post: President Donald Trump is planning to announce his nominee to fill the vacant seat of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia at 8 pm Eastern Tuesday. You can watch a live stream above.