The Senate will vote on Neil Gorsuch's confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court Friday morning at approximately 11:45 AM ET, about seven hours earlier than necessary. How did the Democrats lose seven hours of debate time on the most consequential of issues? Minority Leader Chuck Schumer agreed to give them away. Does that matter when the result is already baked in, when Mitch McConnell has already changed the rules to assure an outcome—a right-wing ideologue and Republican operative on the court?
Yes it matters. It matters because the stakes right now are very high, because Democrats have few powers, but they have a critical one—to be a thorn in McConnell's side and to make nothing quick or easy for him. That means using up every potential parliamentary procedure and every single second of time available to them to block him from his malign enabling of an illegitimate president. It's not hyperbole. McConnell is in the process of, in the words of professor Thomas Levenson "destroying the American experiment and ending the American century."
In the last 24 hours, we've found out that McConnell actively suppressed CIA information provided to him and other congressional leaders that Russia was interfering in the U.S. election and that it was doing so to help Donald Trump, possibly in collusion with his campaign. That's the culmination of a concerted and single-minded campaign by McConnell to undermine President Barack Obama at every turn, never mind that he was doing untold damage to the government and the nation. He did it with unprecedented use of the filibuster to keep the executive and judicial branches as broken as the Congress, taking the global economy hostage with threats of refusing to lift the debt ceiling, openly declaring that his primary goal as a lawmaker was to see that Barack Obama had only one term in office and that nothing he attempted to do succeeded.
Why is Chuck Schumer rewarding that behavior in even the smallest way?
Why did Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) heroically stand on the Senate floor for 15 and a half hours making the case against Gorsuch? Not to see his leadership give in, not to see Schumer give up on the potential marathon of procedural motions and objections that could force this vote to be delayed maybe until after the upcoming recess.
Sen. Schumer, you need to do better if you're going to be part of the resistance. We will have your back when you have ours. And you need the resistance if you harbor any dreams of being majority leader in your tenure. You're not going to get the Senate back without us. You're not going to save the country by giving Mitch McConnell one damned inch.