New Standard
While Sen. King, along with Democrats like Joe Manchin, Heidi Heitkamp, Michael Bennet and Joe Donnelly, was contemplating a vote for cloture other Democrats like Senators Menendez and Cardin, remained tactically undecided. A pro-cloture vote by any of these seven would deny that having Gorsuch on the Court would be worse for the country than not having any new justice on the Court at all. This is the choice that Republicans made about Chief Judge Merrick Garland, and thereby established a new standard for Senate confirmation of Supreme Court nominees.
Without suffering any voter backlash in the 2016 election, Republicans introduced this new political standard for use against the nominee chosen by a president who was at comparable times in his tenure, and still remains, considerably more popular than Trump. By returning a Republican-controlled Senate in 2016, the public voted to accept this new political standard for denying confirmation of the relatively popular Obama's Supreme Court nominee.
The only reason for an opposing party to accept the nominee of a president from the other party is deference to the will of the people as a whole whom the president uniquely represents. But fewer than a quarter of Americans who support Gorsuch do so because they trust Trump to nominate a Supreme Court justice who will "do a good job." Meanwhile 52% of those who oppose Gorsuch say they oppose him because they do not trust Trump to make such a nomination. From right out of the gate Trump has remained on course to be the most consistently unpopular president in US history by a large margin. Going into the week of the Gorsuch vote, Gallup showed Trump had reached a new historic low point. In addition, Democratic voters are generally in an exceptionally negative mood about compromise with Trump on anything. Trump's Supreme Court choice therefore deserves no deference by Democratic politicians whatsoever, even under the old rules.
Even if Trump did represent the legitimate will of the majority, rather than the fraudulent product of a corrupt and broken political system in which he lost the popular vote, the new standard for confirmation honestly acknowledges that a highly politicized Supreme Court majority regularly makes highly political decisions on the basis of their own political biases rather than of any clear text in the Constitution. Deference based on process concerns have therefore yielded to politics. The battle over Gorsuch is because of his politics.
Behind his facade of "shrewdly calculated innocence," not to say " smarmy," entitled, and "condescending" arrogance, this is a fact that Gorsuch himself lied about in his confirmation hearings. He falsely claimed: "There is no such thing as a Republican or a Democratic judge" when in fact the Supreme Court is currently divided 4-4 between Democrats and Republicans in political cases. The very importance of Gorsuch to Republicans that would cause them to go so far as to overturn the Senate's venerable filibuster rule against their own long-term interest is that he will be a reliable political tie-breaker in the political decisions made by the judicial supremacist and plutocratic faction of the Court.
Gorsuch has never done anything significant for the country. Plutocrats care nothing about his ability to discern and apply rules of law. He is simply a sure fifth vote for plutocracy who has the elite certifications that pass for qualifications in a plutocratic era. His seat on the Court is worth spending millions to achieve because the payoff will be counted by the plutocracy in billions.
In response to questions at his hearing, Gorsuch deceitfully refused to acknowledge the right-wing political decisions that he planned to make. His stance, which he claimed to be rooted in judicial ethics, rejected the right of the American people to know what an extreme right-wing Swamp ideologue Trump has nominated. It denies that, before he takes his seat and begins improperly enacting his ideology into law alongside the four other right-wing extremist justices, the people have a right to know whether and how he satisfied the anti-abortion and other litmus tests that Trump promised to apply to this nomination. Due to Gorsuch's stonewalling, the hearings made little news, and therefore relatively little is known by the broader public about Gorsuch compared to the profound importance for the whole public of his appointment to the Court.
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