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Proponents of the nuclear option say it is necessary to prevent Democrats from using the filibuster to permanently prevent a vote to confirm Gorsuch. Opponents of the nuclear option say it will not only fundamentally alter the nature of the Senate, it will also greatly empower Democrats when they retake the Senate and the White House. At its core, the debate over the nuclear option highlights the tension between the need for debate and the need for finality on judicial matters. Unfortunately, exercising the nuclear option is a zero-sum game. If it’s invoked, debate is dead. If it isn’t, proponents...

What allows Schumer to thwart the majority’s will and paralyze the Senate? Not the U.S. Constitution, as the framers designed it. The answer is a centuries-old Senate practice called the filibuster. Senators in the minority could take the floor and talk endlessly, never agreeing to formally end debate so the majority could vote. They’d talk the legislation to death or “filibuster” it, in the process shutting down all other Senate business. The House never permitted it, always allowing a simple majority to shut down debate. In the Senate, the idea was to make sure the minority was heard. But over...

Republicans cheered Tuesday's historic confirmation vote for Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary — Vice President Mike Pence cast the tie-breaking vote — slamming Democrats as obstructionists and saying that President Donald Trump was entitled to his Cabinet picks. "President Trump has assembled a first-class team for his Cabinet, and obstructing all of these confirmation votes is only delaying the important work that needs to be done," Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton said. "In my conversation with Betsy DeVos, I found her to have a deep appreciation for the value of public schools and a special concern for the needs of the...

Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) told CNN anchor Chris Cuomo on Wednesday that he looks forward to meeting with President Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Judge Neil Gorsuch, and has no intention of filibustering him with fellow Democrats. Manchin began the interview by scolding Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) and other Republican senators for refusing to allow a vote on former President Obama's Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland last year. While Manchin acknowledged that Republicans probably had enough votes to block Garland, he said that they should have at least met with Garland and allowed a vote. Manchin then...

President Donald Trump said he will urge Senate Republicans to scrap filibuster rules, or take the so-called "nuclear option," if Democrats in the increasingly tense chamber use them to block his nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. After Trump nominated the 49-year-old conservative appeals judge to the top U.S. court Tuesday night, Democrats signaled they could delay the process. If they filibuster, Republicans, who have 52 Senate seats, would need 60 votes to confirm him unless they cut that rule. Trump told reporters Wednesday that he would encourage Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to take that route,...

Matthews said politics have become so polarized that is natural to assume there will be a filibuster against Judge Gorsuch. "I think this is going to come down, to a sad denouement," Matthews said Wednesday night. "I think it's going to take 60 votes to get this approved and I think the Republicans will have their rank-and-file 52 votes will be there. But I don't think the Democrats are going to give them a single vote which mean this will go to a filibuster." "I don't think they'll get 60 votes because I don't think they'll get a single Democratic...

President Donald Trump tonight has nominated pro-life friendly federal appeals court Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Gorsuch has taken the pro-life side in important cases and written a book excoriating assisted suicide. The 49-year-old Judge Gorsuch, if confirmed, would replace pro-life Justice Antonin Scalia – who supporting overturning Roe v. Wade and allowing states to once again provide legal protection for unborn children. Justice Gorsuch is currently a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, which includes the districts of Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, as well as the Eastern, Northern...

New plan, new plan! Uh-oh. It appears there’s trouble in “ugly Hollywood.” After promising that they would filibuster President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee - no matter who he or she was - it seems that cold feet have taken hold. Dems may now be looking for a respectable way to back away from Chuck Schumer’s obstructionist plans.

Senate Democrats are weighing whether to avoid an all-out war to block President Donald Trump's upcoming Supreme Court pick, instead considering delaying that battle for a future nomination that could shift the ideological balance of the court, sources say. Democrats privately discussed their tactics during a closed-door retreat in West Virginia last week. And a number of Democrats are trying to persuade liberal firebrands to essentially let Republicans confirm Trump's pick after a vigorous confirmation process -- since Trump is likely to name a conservative to replace the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. The reason for the tactic: Republicans are...

With their angry left-wing base whipped into a frenzy of opposition on virtually every imaginable front, some Senate Democrats are promising to wage a filibuster against President Trump's yet-unnamed Supreme Court nominee. The president will unveil his selection tomorrow evening, yet Democrats are preemptively vowing to obstruct anyone he chooses -- retaliation, they say, for Republicans' refusal to consider the nomination of Merrick Garland under the Biden Rule. Battle lines, drawn: Senate Democrats are going to try to bring down President Donald Trump's Supreme Court pick no matter who the president chooses to the fill the current vacancy. With Trump prepared...

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has threatened to stonewall Donald Trump’s pick to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, telling MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Schumer said: “It’s hard for me to imagine a nominee that Donald Trump would choose that would get Republican support that we could support.” When Maddow asked, “You will do your best to hold the seat open?” Schumer replied, “Absolutely.” The fact is, Senate Democrats are powerless to stop Trump from appointing and confirming a rock-ribbed conservative to replace Scalia. Here is what Trump should tell Schumer in so uncertain terms: •As you know, I have put out a...

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R) said Republicans should fight to get President Trump's coming Supreme Court nominee confirmed by any means necessary. Trump has said he will be announcing his choice to fill the late Antonin Scalia's seat on the bench next week. Republicans will need at least eight Democrats to support Trump's nominee to overcome the 60-vote filibuster hurdle. But Cruz suggested the GOP shouldn't rule out the so-called "nuclear option" to reduce the threshold to a majority. The move would be a gamble, setting a precedent that could weaken the GOP's position if Democrats come back into power....

Dems digging the hole deeper Democrats don’t understand what happened in the 2016 election. They don’t know why they lost and they have no concept of how badly they were beaten. I’ve made this point a hundred times. We see their denial in their post-election defiance, their doubling-down on people like Pelosi, and the bitter name-calling aimed at anyone who didn’t support Hillary Clinton. They cling to popular vote totals, buoyed by left-wing superstates New York and California, so they can whistle past their electoral graveyard and their brutal 2018 map.

Rules: You have to laugh at the Democrats' current plight. They have almost no leverage to block anyone Donald Trump decides to select for judgeships or cabinet posts. They can't stop Republicans from repealing most of ObamaCare. And they only have themselves to blame. On CNN this week, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer was lamenting the fact that Democrats wouldn't be able to use the filibuster to stop Trump's nominees. There should, he said, be "60 votes because on such important positions there should be some degree of bipartisanship." And who, exactly, is to blame for this? Schumer's predecessor in...

Rules: You have to laugh at the Democrats' current plight. They have almost no leverage to block anyone Donald Trump decides to select for judgeships or cabinet posts. They can't stop Republicans from repealing most of ObamaCare. And they only have themselves to blame. On CNN this week, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer was lamenting the fact that Democrats wouldn't be able to use the filibuster to stop Trump's nominees. There should, he said, be "60 votes because on such important positions there should be some degree of bipartisanship." And who, exactly, is to blame for this? Schumer's predecessor in...

Outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said he is confident that he has laid the groundwork for Democrats to nuke the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees if they win back the Senate in November. Envisioning Hillary Clinton in the White House and Democrats controlling the Senate, Reid warned that if a Senate Republican minority block her Supreme Court nominee, he is confident the party won’t hesitate to change the filibuster rules again. Such a move would be an extension of what Reid did in 2013 when he was still majority leader, eliminating filibusters (with a simple majority vote) on...

Incoming Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) says he regrets a 2013 decision by Senate Democrats, known as the “nuclear option” to decrease the number of senators needed to confirm Cabinet picks from 60 to 51 votes. “I wish it hadn’t happened,” Schumer said in an interview with CNN, about the move that was triggered by former Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid (D-NV). The move is dubbed the “nuclear option” because by altering the filibuster rules it stands to blow up bipartisan Senate relations. “I argued against it at the time,” Schumer said. “I said both for Supreme Court and...

Remember when Democrats insisted that incoming presidents had to get immediate confirmation of Cabinet appointments for the good of the nation? What a difference an (R) makes ... The Washington Post’s Ed O’Keefe reports on a plan by Senate Democrats to “slow walk” confirmation of Donald Trump’s appointments, including an insistence on nor more than two confirmations a week: Democratic senators plan to aggressively target eight of Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees in the coming weeks and are pushing to stretch their confirmation votes into March — an unprecedented break with Senate tradition.Such delays would upend Republican hopes of quickly holding...

Determined to hold around two dozen Senate seats in 2018, Democrats will use the coming series of confirmation hearings to try to distinguish themselves from President-elect Donald Trump's billionaire nominees and convince working-class voters who elected him that he's not on their side. While Democrats have little leverage to stop the Republican's picks in the Senate, they still plan a fight. To highlight what they say is the hypocrisy of Trump's campaign promise to be a champion for the economically struggling little guy, they'll focus on the nominees' wealth, ties to Wall Street and willingness to privatize Medicare, among other...

When Harry Reid and the rest of the Senate Democrats teamed up three years ago to nuke the filibuster on presidential appointments, Republicans warned them they’d live to regret it. Now that day has arrived, and Chris Coons tells CNN’s Kate Bolduan he does regret it — mainly because, as Republicans tried to tell Democrats, they have no way of stopping a Republican president from appointing “extreme” nominees to key positions. Coons, who is trying to block Jeff Sessions’ nomination as Attorney General, says that Republicans need to help him