Ugly process grinds to an end

As the ultimate outcome of the Neil M. Gorsuch nomination-confirmation process was never in doubt, the most common reaction to Friday’s dropping of the proverbial shoe was probably relief.

Gorsuch was confirmed by a 54-45 vote after Senate Republicans broke a Democratic filibuster by changing — in a simple majority vote —— a longstanding rule and lowered the threshold for confirmation of Supreme Court nominees … to a simple majority vote. (Filibusters on legislation will still require the traditional 60 votes for cloture.)

Gorsuch’s confirmation comes at the end of a long, unseemly, petulant, politically and civically corrosive sequence of events that has gone on now for more than a year, and from which almost no one involved has emerged unsullied.

Literally within hours of the death of Justice Antonin Scalia on Feb. 13, 2016, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, drew a political line in the dirt: With almost a year left in the Obama presidency, McConnell said no nominee would be confirmed until the next administration. Obama nominee Merrick Garland was refused even token consideration, much less a hearing.

A year-plus later, Republican claims that Democrats have been guilty of “obstruction” (seriously?), like Democratic claims that a Supreme Court seat (theirs?) was “stolen,” are such transparent and intelligence-insulting nonsense we’re led to wonder if anybody in either party has the capacity for shame or embarrassment.

Gorsuch’s academic and legal credentials, like those of his future colleagues, are unassailable: A graduate of Columbia, Harvard and Oxford, he has worked as a Justice Department attorney and a Supreme Court law clerk — for Justice Anthony Kennedy, with whom he will soon serve.

Like almost all court nominees, Garland has said virtually nothing of political substance and has refused to speculate how he would vote on cases that should come before the court. The New York Times described Gorsuch as “a reliable conservative committed to following the original understanding of those who drafted and ratified the Constitution.”

But almost three decades after the end of the Reagan era, “neocon” and “alt-right” variations on the theme have left the very definition of “conservative” open to broad legal, philosophical and political debate. A seeming epidemic of smug certainty, across the political spectrum, about the “original” intent of the Founders (as if these men were all of one accord in the first place) hasn’t clarified matters.

If those kinds of ambiguities mean Neil Gorsuch won’t easily fit into an obvious and predictable political mold, so much the better.

As for the process by which he was ultimately confirmed, this radical rewriting of the rules could be one of those “careful what you wish for” things. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who voted for the measure with what he said was “great reluctance,” warned that in “an era where a simple majority decides all judicial nominations, we will see more and more nominations from the extremes.”

Surely that can’t have been an “original” intent.

This story was originally published April 10, 2017 at 4:51 PM with the headline "Ugly process grinds to an end."