With an announcement from Senator Christopher Coons, Democrat of Delaware, during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing to vote on Judge Gorsuch’s nomination, Democrats had found their 41st vote in support of a filibuster.
WooooOOOooooo! For now.
Despite the fact that Gorsuch sides with companies over working people such as the truck drivers Trump recently fellated in a photo op, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary committee will probably vote today to push Gorsuch's nomination through for a full vote in the Senate.
When the vote to confirm Gorsuch reaches the full senate, Democrats will filibuster. Since Republicans now don't have the 60 votes they'd need to end the blockade, Senator Mitch McConnell will have to decide whether he wants to kill the filibuster for supreme court nominations forever and ever, or pick another nominee to fill the seat he stole from Merrick Garland.
McConnell has indicated, more than once, that he's willing to "go nuclear" and blow up the filibuster, which would mean that Republicans and Democrats will need simple majorities to confirm Supreme Court justices from here on out. In an interview with PolitiFact, University of Miami political scientist Gregory Koger said the move would be a "landmark political event, highlighting to the country that the court has become a wholly political body staffed by ideologues."
Politically, McConnell's threat to go nuclear means that Democrats can flex how they will. They can appease their phone-banking base by blustering about their willingness to filibuster, knowing full well Gorsuch will probably be confirmed anyway. Meanwhile, blue Senators who are up for re-election this year in red states—Joe Manchin (West Virginia), Heidi Heitkamp (North Dakota, and Joe Donnelly (Indiana)—can return to their conservative constituents and say they're not party lemmings. After much deliberation, they decided to support Gorsuch because he's a "well-respected jurist," and so forth. Republicans get their pro-corporate, right-of-Scalia Scalia on the bench for 40-ish more years, and women, LGBTQ people, and the working poor suffer for it.
