{"id":19566,"date":"2017-02-03T01:28:31","date_gmt":"2017-02-03T01:28:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=19566"},"modified":"2017-02-03T01:28:31","modified_gmt":"2017-02-03T01:28:31","slug":"catfight-over-gorsuch-wait-until-the-next-justice-leaves-the-court","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=19566","title":{"rendered":"Catfight over Gorsuch? Wait until the next justice leaves the court"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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“So, are you ready for the catfight that’s going to erupt over this guy Trump has picked for the Supreme Court?”<\/p>\n

That was the question posed to me today by a colleague of mine.<\/p>\n

The reference, of course, was to Donald Trump’s nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the highest court in the land.<\/p>\n

“Catfight? Over this? Naw. The earth is going to open up and quake when the next justice leaves the court,” I said, referring to the possibility that either Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer or Anthony Kennedy might leave the court.<\/p>\n

That, I said, will produce the “mother of all catfights.”<\/p>\n

Gorsuch’s nomination doesn’t change a thing on the court. The president is seeking to place a judicial conservative on the court to replace another conservative’s seat, that of the late Antonin Scalia, who died in February 2016.<\/p>\n

Yes, Senate Democrats are enraged. Not at the selection of Gorsuch, necessarily, but over the treatment that President Obama got when he nominated Merrick Garland this past year to succeed Scalia.<\/p>\n

My own thought is that Gorsuch is likely to be as good a choice as Democrats are going to get, given Trump’s insistence on picking a conservative judge.<\/p>\n

No, the real donnybrook will occur when one of the liberals or swing justices decides to leave … or is unable to serve.<\/p>\n

My own advice to Democrats would be to pick their fights carefully. Sure, they battle Gorsuch’s nomination. They’ll insist on keeping the 60-vote majority required to approve a Supreme Court nomination. Republicans might decide to invoke the “nuclear option” and allow a 51-vote majority.<\/p>\n

I have no real clue as to which way this fight will go.<\/p>\n

It might serve Democrats better to hold their fire for the next vacancy when — or if — it occurs during Trump’s time in office.<\/p>\n

Given the tenuous ideological balance of the court, with its slim conservative majority, I sincerely doubt that Justices Ginsburg and Breyer — both picked by President Clinton in the 1990s — are going to resign amid the political climate that has fallen over Washington.<\/p>\n

As for Justice Kennedy, one of President Reagan’s picks, well, that might be another matter.<\/p>\n

Whatever happens, the serious political bloodletting is yet to occur.<\/p>\n\n

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“So, are you ready for the catfight that’s going to erupt over this guy Trump has picked for the Supreme Court?” That was the question posed to me today by a colleague of mine. The reference, of course, was to Donald Trump’s nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the highest court in the land. “Catfight? … Continue reading Catfight over Gorsuch? Wait until the next justice leaves the court<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,13,14],"tags":[412,540,1424,6063,6899,5053],"class_list":["post-19566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-legal-news","category-national-news","category-political-news","tag-antonin-scalia","tag-barack-obama","tag-donald-trump","tag-merrick-garland","tag-neil-gorsuch","tag-us-supreme-court"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19566"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19566\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19568,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19566\/revisions\/19568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}