Strange hill to die on

Neil Gorsuch will be the next U.S. Supreme Court justice. It's just a question of when at this point, something which Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer indicated will not be ASAP.

Schumer announced Thursday that Democrats will filibuster Gorsuch and force Republicans to muster 60 votes to advance him to a final up-or-down vote.

“He will have to earn 60 votes for confirmation. My vote will be no, and I urge my colleagues to do the same,” he said on the Senate floor.

Republicans have threatened to change the Senate’s filibuster rule to exempt Supreme Court nominees from procedural gridlock — a controversial tactic often referred to as the "nuclear option" that Democrats deployed in 2013 to protect Cabinet and lower-court judges from filibusters.

Schumer, however, argued the problem is not with the chamber’s rules, but with a nominee who has regularly sided with powerful interests over average Americans in high-profile cases.

And there is the leftist mentality in a nutshell regarding the judicial branch of government. Forget the old legal tenets of impartiality, justice being blind, etc. Leftists prefer that the court system merely be an extension of their left-wing legislative philosophy.

Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA), when stating he too would vote "no" on Gorsuch, also conveyed this mindset.

"I don't believe his judicial approach would ensure fairness for workers and families in Pennsylvania and across the country," Casey said.

If Gorsuch issues his legal rulings on the basis of what is the law and thus the law is what is unfair towards "average Americans," then guess what? It's under the purview of the legislative branch to address that accordingly. Looking at you, Sens. Schumer and Casey.

In the end, the Dems still aren't over the fact that Merrick Garland wasn't given a hearing last year when President Barack Obama named him as the nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia. Allowing Gorsuch to sail through confirmation would only serve to give Democrats a brutal reminder that they failed to paint the GOP Senate majority as "obstructionist and unreasonable" to the point where they'd lose power in the last election cycle.

In 2018, there are ten Democrat-held Senate seats which will be up for election in states where President Donald Trump won in November. One of those ten, one (Casey of Pennsylvania) has already gone on record as a "no." It'll be interesting to see how many of the other nine look to not only delay the inevitable but also risk their seat flipping GOP.

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