By: Niels Lesniewski
As the Senate moves toward getting rid of the ability of 41 senators to block Supreme Court nominees, moderates could see their profiles rise in any post “nuclear option” reality with a renewed emphasis on party unity.
Conventional wisdom is that presidents would be able to pick more stridently partisan nominees for the high court if the risk of a super majority filibuster is eliminated. But such a procedural change would also put a bigger target on moderate members of the majority.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has said he has the votes to move ahead with the process of changing the chamber’s precedents by allowing a simple majority to break the Democratic filibuster of Judge Neil Gorsuch to fill a vacant Supreme Court seat.
The result might be something like what happened this year with the efforts to repeal and replace the 2010 health care law, according to filibuster expert Sarah Binder of George Washington University and the Brookings Institution. When the chambers consider legislation where a simple majority is required, such as the budget reconciliation process, all the focus is on various factions of GOP lawmakers.
“That 60 vote threshold takes the spotlight off of the majority, as we’ve seen with Gorsuch. Moving to simple majority cloture would make every Republican vote pivotal to confirmation,” Binder said. “There’s no minority party to blame for blocking a nominee.”
Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican known for moderate stances particularly on social policy, said she was well aware that the “nuclear option” vote will change the calculation going forward.
“One of my concerns is it makes it more likely that presidents will submit more ideological choices. And I don’t think that’s good for the court,” Collins said. “But unfortunately the Democrats put us in this position by making it clear that they will block an imminently well-qualified individual.”
Should President Donald Trump get a second Supreme Court nomination with the same 52 seats in Republican hands, Collins and her colleagues would be sure to face more outside lobbying and advertising.
End Citizens United, a group opposed to Gorsuch and dedicated to trying to overturn the Supreme Court Citizens United decision that deregulated most campaign spending, has already worked against potentially vulnerable Republicans like Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada, who is up for re-election in 2018, but that would only ramp up with an effective simple majority threshold.
“We will evaluate future nominees based on their record on money in politics and if, like Judge Gorsuch, they are bad on the issue we’ll oppose them. That means pushing all senators — targeting Republicans as well as Democrats to ensure they don’t get to 50 votes,” said End Citizens United spokesman Adam Bozzi. “If Mitch McConnell takes the unprecedented step of destroying the Senate’s filibuster, there will be an extraordinary amount of pressure on Republicans like Collins, Murkowski, Heller and others to do the right thing.”