Republicans have unanimously voted to end Supreme Court filibusters and will confirm Neil Gorsuch. This was always the most likely outcome. But Democrats did the right thing in forcing Republicans to end judicial filibusters.
The bad news is that Neil Gorsuch will be on the Supreme Court, making Scalia-like decisions for three decades. Some judges are further right and some judges are younger, but it's hard to get both at once. That's serious bad news, but it's basically the only bad news, and it was the likely outcome ever since Trump won the election.
People will say it's bad that we've lost the ability to filibuster further Trump Supreme Court nominees. They're wrong. This party-line vote shows us that our filibusters weren't ever going to succeed. McConnell was always going to be able to break the filibuster, as long as Republicans had a Senate majority. He probably would've had an easier time after 2018, as we have to defend 25 Senate seats including some in very conservative states (WV, ND, IN, MO, MT). We'll probably lose some Senators then, so this was the best shot we were going to get.
There are two long-term benefits here. First, it'll be easier for Democrats to confirm their own judges. I was chatting with a Democrat at the center of this fight in DC yesterday. He specifically brought up the prospect of being more ambitiously left-wing in our party's judicial appointments in the future, now that Republicans can't filibuster them.
The second benefit is that this makes it easier to end the legislative filibuster someday. And that would benefit progressives much more than conservatives. Why?
It'll take more than a Trump Administration to end my faith in human progress. The world has become wealthier and less prejudiced over the centuries, and I expect that long-term trend to continue, barring nuclear war or some other global catastophe. From a blog post I wrote back in 2009:
"So if you make it easy to change the laws, you make it easy for a society to have the laws that people want in a high-tech, unprejudiced society. But if you make it hard to change the laws, you stick us to laws from the past. The filibuster is basically a way of making it very hard to change big laws, so it keeps us a couple decades behind the present."
Neil Gorsuch will do his best to keep America trapped in the brutal and impoverished past. But if today's events make it easier to end the legislative filibuster, that moves us towards an enlightened and generous future.
The bad news is that Neil Gorsuch will be on the Supreme Court, making Scalia-like decisions for three decades. Some judges are further right and some judges are younger, but it's hard to get both at once. That's serious bad news, but it's basically the only bad news, and it was the likely outcome ever since Trump won the election.
People will say it's bad that we've lost the ability to filibuster further Trump Supreme Court nominees. They're wrong. This party-line vote shows us that our filibusters weren't ever going to succeed. McConnell was always going to be able to break the filibuster, as long as Republicans had a Senate majority. He probably would've had an easier time after 2018, as we have to defend 25 Senate seats including some in very conservative states (WV, ND, IN, MO, MT). We'll probably lose some Senators then, so this was the best shot we were going to get.
There are two long-term benefits here. First, it'll be easier for Democrats to confirm their own judges. I was chatting with a Democrat at the center of this fight in DC yesterday. He specifically brought up the prospect of being more ambitiously left-wing in our party's judicial appointments in the future, now that Republicans can't filibuster them.
The second benefit is that this makes it easier to end the legislative filibuster someday. And that would benefit progressives much more than conservatives. Why?
It'll take more than a Trump Administration to end my faith in human progress. The world has become wealthier and less prejudiced over the centuries, and I expect that long-term trend to continue, barring nuclear war or some other global catastophe. From a blog post I wrote back in 2009:
"So if you make it easy to change the laws, you make it easy for a society to have the laws that people want in a high-tech, unprejudiced society. But if you make it hard to change the laws, you stick us to laws from the past. The filibuster is basically a way of making it very hard to change big laws, so it keeps us a couple decades behind the present."
Neil Gorsuch will do his best to keep America trapped in the brutal and impoverished past. But if today's events make it easier to end the legislative filibuster, that moves us towards an enlightened and generous future.
