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The first time Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell lost a cloture vote this year, he blew up the Senate. He refused repeated Democratic offers to work with him and popular vote loser Donald Trump to find a consensus nominee. Instead, he forced the Senate rules change that he's been threatening since 2005.
Remember back then? Democrats, in the minority, were not happy with George W. Bush's pick of ultra-conservatives Samuel Alito and John Roberts. McConnell threatened then to end the filibuster on Supreme Court nominees, and with that threat, he made the filibuster obsolete. At that point, a bipartisan Senate "gang" came up with a "compromise," but the filibuster no longer really existed as a viable tool for Democrats. McConnell had shown that he'd yank it and Democrats have known since that if Republicans had the majority under him and there was a Republican in the White House, it would be gone.
There's no way Democrats could face this nomination of Neil Gorsuch, who is essentially a Republican operative backed by millions in right-wing dark money, and not do everything in their power to try to stop it. That's even more true because this is a stolen seat. This vote should have happened a year ago, and it should have been for Merrick Garland. But McConnell declared all-out war on President Obama and his nominee. That, as Rep. Adam Schiff so eloquently said "was a nuclear option. The rest is fallout." The rest is history. McConnell's history, presaged in a tweet from him in 2013, after then Majority Leader Harry Reid ended the filibuster on lower court and executive nominees in response to four years of Republican obstruction.
All the crocodile tears in the world from the Republican side won't change the fact that they've irreparably damaged the Senate by putting party before the institution, party before the nation. That's been fact since well before this one vote. In doing so, they've done is forced an extremist on the bench for life on behalf of the most divisive, inept, and dangerous president we've ever had.
Democrats had no choice but to try to stop that. If they hadn't, they would cease to exist as an opposition party. How could they run as the opposition to Trump and the GOP in the next two cycles if they didn't fight with everything they've got? You might not like the results of this filibuster, but it was absolutely necessary. For one thing, it only existed on paper anyway—only as long as Democrats promised not to use it. Save it for the next bad nominee? Why? The threat to filibuster wouldn't have any more power then than it does now, and McConnell would just blow it away then. Now, though, Republicans are on record unanimously carrying out the thing they said would be the end of the Senate as we know it. And they did it for Donald Trump.
Good riddance to the filibuster and good job on the Democrats forcing this—they are making Republicans fully embrace their disaster of a president. Without having done so, they wouldn't be part of the resistance.