“I think it is crazy that we are considering confirming a lifetime Trump nominee to the Supreme Court at a moment when the president’s campaign is under the cloud of an active, ongoing FBI counterintelligence investigation,” Warren said from the Senate floor.She added that the FBI’s probe into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election “could result in indictments and appeals that will go all the way to the Supreme Court, so that Trump’s nominee could be the deciding vote on whether Trump or his supporters broke the law.” … Warren said on Tuesday that the decision to continue with Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation was “nuts.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) made similar comments nearly two weeks ago in an interview with Rachel.It’s hard to deny that Democrats have a credible point. We’re faced with the possibility that the president who’s trying to fill the high-court vacancy is the same president whose legitimacy is called into question by the Russia scandal. The Senate has already waited this long to consider a nominee; there’s no practical reason members can’t delay matters until the investigation is complete.Indeed, several Senate Republicans, as recently as last fall, said they were prepared to leave the Supreme Court vacancy unfilled until 2021, at the earliest. It’s not as if they can persuasively say they’re now in a rush.ABC News’ Matt Dowd, a former George W. Bush aide, suggested over the weekend that Senate Dems should offer Senate Republicans a deal: delay the Gorsuch vote until the conclusion of the investigation into Trump and the Russia scandal, at which point Dems would allow an up-or-down vote without a filibuster.I’m not sure that’s a fair compromise — the underlying problem remains the GOP’s abuses surrounding the Merrick Garland nomination — but it wouldn’t surprise me if Senate Democratic leaders were open to this deal.A variety of Senate Republicans have publicly acknowledged that their planned “nuclear option” is a radical move, which risks doing lasting harm to the institution. If members are looking for a way to avoid this mess, GOP leaders could very easily offer the compromise Matt Dowd suggested.
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Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."