Gorsuch confirmation: A Senate turned sandbox

By now, the U.S. Senate may already have dispensed with tradition and confirmed Judge Neil Gorsuch by simple majority. They would have done this by invoking what is dramatically termed the “nuclear option” — a process by which Senate rules are changed to allow a confirmation vote of Supreme Court nominees with 51 (instead of 60) votes.

If this is the case, take a moment to mourn yet another nail in the coffin for a Senate run by adults.

I do not say this because I’m a liberal and Judge Gorsuch is a conservative. Whatever our philosophical differences, Gorsuch is no more conservative than Justice Clarence Thomas and hardly more conservative than former Justice Antonin Scalia. His appointment to the bench would be the logical outcome of a Republican-controlled Senate.

My issue, rather, is with Democratic obstinacy.

A dense fog of jargon and tradition shrouds any Senate preceding, so I’ll try to break this one down in English for clarity’s sake: After a Supreme Court nominee passes a committee vote, his or her nomination gets debated on the Senate floor by all 100 representatives. All 100 must agree to end debate in order to move forward with a final vote.

When one more refuses to stop debating, we have a filibuster on our hands. To end a filibuster, a Senator must file a cloture motion, which allows for 60 senators to vote to end debate and move forward with the final vote.

In the past, a vote to confirm the nominee did not correlate perfectly with a vote to end debate. Senator John Doe might not agree with nominee X, but agreement does not determine qualification. The Supreme Court needs justices, and the Senate has other work to attend to. Doe votes to end debate and tosses his name in the “Do Not Confirm” pile for confirmation. The nominee has the majority she needs, and voila: We have a new justice.

This year, however, is different. Democratic senators have by-and-large indicated they will not vote to end debate and will instead protest Gorsuch’s nomination indefinitely. Why? I’m not quite sure.

Many claim that he’s remarkably unfit for the position; others claim 60 confirmation votes are necessary to ensure a justice whose views align with the mainstream. But both of these arguments are weak.

Looking at qualifications alone, Gorsuch looks like most other justices on the court: an Ivy League education, a clerkship at the Supreme Court, a largely uncontroversial federal judgeship. Considering ideology, he stakes out no uncharacteristically conservative positions. As for vote totals, two sitting justices were confirmed with less than 60 votes (Alito and Thomas).

The reason we’re left with, then, is pettiness — hypocritical payback for Republican refusal to vote on former President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland — and this should frustrate us all. Merrick Garland is not coming back. President Donald Trump (a phrase that still astounds me to type) in an impossibly rare flash of maturity managed to nominate an immensely qualified conservative rather than an insane ideologue or reality show judge. If there is a God, Gorsuch was heaven-sent to give us all a break.

Democrats could have bitten the bullet, allowed a vote on his confirmation, and followed Michelle Obama’s lead: going high when they go low. Instead, in an act of political expediency that only further sows division, they decided to deliver jabs of their own.

And so the Senate turns sandbox. For as principled, progressive and inspiring as senators like Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders can be, each bows to the temptation of a partisan food fight. Republicans in turn will throw out the filibuster, and Gorsuch will be confirmed anyway.

There is a sliver of hope, however. If a vote on cloture has not yet taken place, call your representative! Our senators may be children, but we can be the adults who tell them what to do.

Champe Barton is a UF economics and psychology junior. His column appears on Fridays.