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The Senate has cast enough votes to confirm Neil Gorsuch, a 49-year-old federal judge who could help cement a conservative majority on the bench for decades, to the Supreme Court, according to a CNN count of the vote.

One of the greatest decisions of the 20th Century was the unflinching order by President Harry S. Truman to drop two bombs on Japan. It ended a war with a relentless and suicidal global aggressor. It saved countless lives of American soldiers, who already had suffered through years of the most savage and barbaric fighting ever known to man in the Pacific theater. The more than 200,000 Japanese killed by the atomic bombs came nowhere close to the millions and millions of innocent Chinese and others slaughtered by Japan during World War II. And for 72 years, the “nuclear option”...

The partisan journalists at MSNBC proved they have no problem flip flopping when it comes to filibustering and the nuclear option. As the Republicans were voting to change the Senate rules, Thursday, and confirm Neil Gorsuch, MSNBC blamed Donald Trump. Andrea Mitchell lectured, “This is another history-making moment, which another White House might have been able to avoid, perhaps with better leadership.”  Here are a few examples: “I agree with you about this being an affirmative win for democracy. If that is the case, why do we still have the filibuster for legislation?” — Host Chris Hayes on MSNBC’s All...

Quite a headline, I realize, and I won't even mention the screaming conflict between her status as a celebrated Social Justice Warrior and her decision to perpetrate a racial hoax -- whether through reckless sloppiness or willful intent -- in order to advance her own career. She was never a Native American, but nevertheless, she persisted in claiming that false origin story. Until she became a tenured professor at Harvard, that is. As I've discussed at greater length elsewhere, it turns out that celebrity leftists who violate certain lefty pieties are eligible for waivers to wash away their cultural...

BREAKING: Senate votes 52-48 to repeal rule allowing filibusters against Supreme Court nominees, clearing the way for Gorsuch confirmation

Senate Republicans deployed the so-called “nuclear option” Thursday afternoon in a bid to confirm Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, moving to overcome a Democratic filibuster just minutes earlier. The Senate initially voted 55-45 on a motion to end debate on Gorsuch, with four Democrats breaking ranks; it needed 60 to succeed. Known as a filibuster, this vote triggered Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to go “nuclear.” This means he is trying to change Senate precedent so that the Senate can move to a final roll call with just a simple majority of 51 votes, as opposed to 60....

Filibuster vote

Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, delivered the following speech on the Senate floor on Tuesday about Judge Neil Gorsuch, who has been nominated to the Supreme Court:[Snip] I'll be honest - I think it's crazy that we are considering confirming a lifetime Trump nominee to the Supreme Court at a moment when the President's campaign is under the cloud of an active, ongoing FBI counterintelligence investigation that could result in indictments and appeals that will go all the way to the Supreme Court - so that Trump’s nominee could be the deciding vote on whether Trump or his supporters...

Senator Eric Brakey is a resident of Auburn, with five generations of family roots in the town of New Gloucester. He was elected to the Maine State Senate in 2014 at the age of 26, making him the youngest State Senator in the state and in the nation. Senator Brakey received a majority of votes in all five municipalities, making him the only Republican challenger to win a majority in Auburn since Olympia Snowe’s 1976 State Senate race. Senator Brakey is a leader in the state house and serves as the Senate Chairman of the Health and Human Services Committee,...

Check the polls for the last 10 years (at least): no single profession, nor any other group of people in America, is more universally despised than the US Congress and its members (although, thanks largely to their control over reelection variables, their constituents usually reelect almost all of them.) Their “approval” rating as a group is often in the teens and, today, is actually at one of its high-water marks – up to the low 20’s in some polls!

Senators in both parties predict blowing up the Senate’s rules to confirm Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch will inflict serious damage on the institution. Democrats are mulling whether to employ the same retaliatory tactics that Republicans used in 2013 after Democrats triggered the “nuclear option” to prevent the GOP from filibustering President Obama’s executive branch and judicial nominees. “They used the age-old Senate tactic of slowing things to a crawl, which you can do under the rules of the Senate,” said Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.), referring to Republicans. “I can’t tell you what’s going to happen next,” he...

They knew the consequences when they went nuclear. Now they’re headed down into the bomb shelter. America Rising @ARSquared Whoa. In 2013, Reid asked if he was worried GOP could change filibuster on #SCOTUS. His response: "Let 'em do it" http://ntknetwork.com/flashback-schumer-we-would-prefer-up-or-down-votes-over-obstruction/ … 12:46 PM - 4 Apr 2017 Speaking of consequences, watch McConnell’s response at 5:00 when he’s asked if he has the votes to eliminate the filibuster.

State Rep. Geoff Diehl is setting up a federal fundraising account in his first official move toward challenging U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, offering an early gauge of how much anti-Warren money could flow into the race from around the country. Diehl, a conservative Whitman Republican who’s publicly weighed a Senate bid for months, plans to open a campaign account and file a statement of candidacy with the Federal Election Commission tomorrow, he told the Herald.

Democratic Congressman Robert Francis "Beto" O'Rourke, an Irish-American who adopted the Mexican nickname during his childhood in Texas, officially announced on Friday that he will run for U.S. Senate in 2018 against Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas). . . . The Mexican nickname came in handy in 2012 when O'Rourke decided to challenge eight-term incumbent Democrat Silvestre Reyes in a congressional district that is 75 percent Mexican and just 2 percent Irish. O'Rourke won and has since legislated under the belief that he is the representative for both the people of El Paso and neighbor across the U.S. border, Juarez,...

House Republicans immolated themselves over health care last week, and now Democrats are hoping the Senate GOP will perform its own kamikaze turn over Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. If Republicans blink and tolerate Democratic filibusters of High Court nominees, they should hand over their majority to the Democrats now. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s strategy is transparent: Stage-manage an unprecedented filibuster against Judge Gorsuch, and then portray Republicans as radicals if they change Senate rules to break it. The gambit is to coax at least three of the 52 GOP Senators to cut a deal with Democrats that hands the...

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...

The GOP was forced to keep a procedural vote open for just over an hour after two Republicans senators, Alaska's Lisa Murkowski and Maine's Susan Collins, voted against moving ahead on the measure. During that time, the GOP got Pence to the Senate to break a 50-50 tie and cast the deciding vote. He previously broke a tie on the nomination of Betsy DeVos to be education secretary. A final vote on the bill is expected later Thursday, when Pence's vote likely will be needed again.

382 White House signals it can live without border wall funds © Getty Images The White House indicated Wednesday that President Trump could go along with a government funding bill that does not include money to begin building his proposed wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. Senate Republicans are not planning on including the funds in a measure to keep the government funded beyond the end of April.

With the approach of a new baseball season the Trump administration should consider how far it is willing to go to get Neil Gorsuch on the Court. It is critical to get him approved before many more cases are argued. It should be obvious that the Trump presidency is undergoing numerous attacks in the Whack Job Judiciary. Everything it tries to do will be challenged in the courts. One of the strongest steps the Republican Senators could take would be to suspend or eliminate the Filibuster Rule. This has good arguments for it and good arguments against it. But there...

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) says he would consider retiring if Mitt Romney ran to replace him. Hatch told National Journal in a Wednesday interview that he hasn't made a decision yet on whether he will run for reelection in 2018. "I know I made a comment that I'll likely run for reelection. I haven't made that final determination," he said. "There are a bunch of reasons to do it, a bunch of reasons not to do it."