Gorsuch looks like a good guy to me.

He's definitely white.

DOA

White male from Harvard Law. Should be a shoe-in.

I don't recall liberals being all too happy with a black justice.

I heard Woodrow Wilson was livid.

^10/10

Thurgood Marshall was a great justice, leon!

Kennedy will still be a tie-breaker. Kennedy or a liberal justice will have to die or step down for the court to be fully tipped one way or another.

Maybe SCOTUS justices could vote for the law, not for a party.

I blame (begins pointing finger of history)...uh... JOHN MARSHALL!

Poor Garland

He's a FU**ING WHITE MALE

Not a *terrible* nomination for Merrick Garland's seat, but one that should never have been necessary.

Whether or not he was confirmed it's a greater tragedy still that the Senate refused even to have hearings. And considering the great services he's done for the state of Oklahoma, I was fully supportive of him.

Democrats could filibuster, insisting that the next presidential election is just around the corner, and that the next president should pick the next justice. Why not? That worked for the Republicans for a ridiculously long time. They'll all die off and pretty soon we'll be down to one person on the Supreme Court.

"Merrick Garland's seat"

Merrick Garland was never on the Supreme Court. This is Scalia's seat.

The only reason that Garland wasn't given a hearing is because of a Senate rule introduced in 1992 by Joe Biden. Biden said that the Senate shouldn't hear or convene to discuss a Presidential Supreme Court appointment until after the Presidential Election.

This rule was applied to Bush Sr. and to Obama. There is no precedent for filibustering for four years.

What goes around comes around.

When Biden said it, there was no Supreme Court vacancy, so it was hypothetical, and it was with under five months to go until the election, so presumably if a seat became open it would be just 3-4 months until the election before there was a nominee. This past year, the Republicans nearly tripled that amount of delay time to eight+ months before the election, so I suppose the Democrats could triple that time again (ok, a little more than triple, more like quintuple), per Republican precedent to the entire four year term, making a complete mockery of the process....again.

Doesn't matter if they block it then the Senate Republicans will change the rule and make it so a simple-majority is all that is needed to confirm the Supreme Court vacancy. They will have him on there before the Supreme Court cases begin in April.

If the Republicans had followed Biden's '92 remarks, they would have held hearings on Garland the day after the election. Or they would have held hearings on Garland immediately after his nomination, since they were several months earlier in the election cycle than Biden's speech in '92.

Or they would have noticed that Biden said nothing about a rule and offered his own view of what he considered exceptional circumstances.

Of course, the truth of the matter is that no rule was introduced, no seat was vacant, no nomination was delayed, and ND is full of shit. What a goddamn surprise.

Also the 'rule' is much like revealing your tax returns, or putting your businesses into a blind trust. It is just the done thing, not an actual rule as such...

It was never even the 'done thing'. Nobody did it until the Republican Senate invoked it as an excuse to turn a constitutional duty into a partisan 'if we feel like it'. Even Strom Thurmond would have laughed this shit out of the building.

@bo - I agree with you, and oddly enough it seems like Gorsuch is the guy for the job. What do you make of this article? https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/opinion/why-liberals-should-back-neil-gorsuch.html

The Senate should give him a good vetting, but assuming there is nothing awful there, pass him through and save their political capital for fighting some horrible future nominee. The Democratic minority would be best served by picking and choosing their fights so that they don't come off just looking obstructionist.

Gorsuch is a radical on several issues, not least on scientific matters and constitutional questions. He may also been beholden to a rather out-of-the-mainstream notion of judicial restraint.

Do a thorough vetting but if it seems he is not going to abide by established precedent block him.

I haven't read the article, teacon, but from what little I know of him, he seems decent, or, at least, as good as the moderate in me could have wished for. I dislike how Trump tried to change tradition with regard to the selection and how he presented it, though.

@bo

i can't find any opinion by him on Roe V Wade, it's interesting that Trump wouldn't get a conservative who had a solidified stance on it