I already weighed in on the strategic folly of Schumer’s Gorsuch gambit last week at POLITICO Magazine, but I decided it was worth a meditation on the sheer disingenuousness of it all over at National Review.
Neither party has a monopoly on bad faith, but the advantage of McConnell’s gambit was its simplicity. The election-year-vacancy rule, however contrived, lent itself to relentless message discipline. Republicans took great care not to indulge a debate on the process of the nomination, much less the merits of the nominee. It’s here where Schumer’s approach fails: Democrats are lodging an ideological complaint, wrapped in an appeal to principle, inside a procedural red herring.
Schumer’s muddled pretext has flushed his members down an agonizing logical cul de sac. Take Claire McCaskill, emerging from a self-proclaimed “vortex” to announce that she would join a filibuster, despite being up for reelection in 2018 in a state that went for Donald Trump by 19 points less than six months ago. Consider the tortured lede of her piece at Medium.com:
This is a really difficult decision for me. I am not comfortable with either choice. While I have come to the conclusion that I can’t support Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court — and will vote no on the procedural vote and his confirmation — I remain very worried about our polarized politics and what the future will bring, since I’m certain we will have a Senate rule change that will usher in more extreme judges in the future.
While you wouldn’t know it from Schumer’s dodgy rhetoric, or from McCaskill’s em-dash aside, these outcomes are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, it is precisely Senator McCaskill’s opposition on the procedural vote that will probably precipitate the rule change she professes to fear.
Full piece here.