Absolutely.
And this has to do with anything how?
(My apologies if you’ve already explained this to someone else. But no, I haven’t read all 700+ posts in this thread that I didn’t write. And this is not a rhetorical question; I really don’t get it.)
He was going to have this victory regardless. But the main thing the Dems needed to do for their newly aroused base was to show some fight. They did that; they kept the faith. Failing to do that would have been an own goal, and a pretty significant one at that.
Given that the Dems came into this with a crummy hand and few chips, they got about as optimal a result as was possible under the circumstances.
I will.
Republicans better confirm Garland while they can, else Hillary might put up a true blue liberal. Why, she might even nominate Obama! Haha, wouldn’t that be–
Oops.
Lets not forget that SCOTUS battles can occur intraparty.
https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/new-deal/essays/fdr’s-court-packing-plan-study-irony
The way I see it is this:
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The Democrats could have refused to filibuster Gorsuch, admitting that, while he’s not their cup of tea, he’s not such a God-awful choice that it is imperative to block him at all costs, allowing a vote to occur. They then spin this as a reasonable approach, contrast it to the selfish, politically motivated, naked power game the Republicans played over Garland, and portray themselves as willing to work with collegiality. They then reserve the filibuster for a situation in which the stakes are higher (say replacing Justice Ginsburg), and see if they can get a better result.
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The Democrats could filibuster Gorsuch, acting as if it was imperative to stop him from becoming a Supreme Court justice, despite knowing that their effort was meaningless. The result is the removal of the filibuster as a means of stopping the appointment of a justice they really don’t like, in return for getting their base riled up about how the appointment was stolen from Judge Garland almost a full two years before any election of consequence.
In the first instance, there is some admittedly unknown possibility that they get something of value down the road. In the second instance (the one that has actually played out), they get…
NOTHING.
That’s right, nothing. They are getting exactly nothing from this situation. They lose the filibuster option for good. They lose any hope of precluding a very conservative justice from being confirmed down the road. And they are gaining at best some mouth-frothing from the base at a time when a) they don’t need it and b) the mouths are already frothing over all sorts of other things already.
It’s plain and simple stupid. That’s my opinion as a moderate. All you “liberal” participants here, may I suggest that the moment you can justify what was done today on some basis other than what happened to Judge Garland, I might actually re-think my position. And no, it doesn’t matter that some Republicans still are upset about Judge Bork. When your own actions are based upon the poor actions of others (if they are going to do it, so are we, by God!), you’re making poor choices, in life, and in politics.
I don’t entirely disagree with you. At the same time, those are (for the most part) pretty sharp people on Capital Hill, and the Democrats all knew from November that someone like Gorsuch was going to be getting that seat, one way or another. They also knew that the filibuster would be dead as soon as they used it, largely based on what they did in 2013 (which they did at least in part because they believed based on the 2005 standoff that the Republicans would do the next time they were in power anyway, a calculation that at least IMHO was correct.)
They could have “saved their powder” for the next nominee, but the filibuster would only exist until they tried to use it. The nuclear option would get deployed for that next person. I guess you can try to argue that they would have built some sort of filibuster credit by not fighting Gorsuch, but I just don’t see that happening. Might as well go down fighting if you’re going to go down anyway. I think you may be underestimating how much the liberal base might appreciate a doomed attempt even in failure.
And all that said, I think you’re wrong that they gained absolutely nothing. The Democrats had almost no leverage and no way to prevent the confirmation, but at the same time I genuinely believe that some of the Republicans didn’t want to eliminate the filibuster this way, if for no other reason fear of it being deployed against them someday. The only scrap of bargaining power that the Democrats had was that desire of some Republicans, and they succeeded in making them do something they would have preferred not to. Admittedly that can’t realistically do anything to actually assist Democrats until 2020 or later, but “legislative body requires majority to pass legislation” isn’t really all that shocking of an outcome in my book anyway.
In what universe, exactly?
The republicans threatened to get rid of the filibuster back in '05, because the democrats threatened to filibuster a nominee. (No, this is still not the same thing as Reid’s actions in 2013.) Which three republicans could you hypothetically split off from the majority in a future fight who would say, “We’re okay with this nominee, but not with getting rid of the filibuster to push him through. Also, yes, I am totally comfortable getting primaried at the very next possible opportunity.” Collins and Murkowski aren’t sure things either. Honestly, if you think you’re going to find three republican senators who would be unwilling to do that, you have learned nothing from the past 8 years. We couldn’t find three republican senators willing to say “no” to Betsy “I have no idea what my job entails, don’t even know the basics, and helped run education in my home state into the fucking ground” DeVos. We couldn’t find three willing to uphold the filibuster after the obscenity that was refusing to let Obama appoint anyone to the court. The filibuster is dead. It’s been dead since the start of this whole “debate”, and probably since at least 2005. Now it’s just officially dead, so we can all start acting like it.
That might be true, if the moral high ground meant anything in America.
But your morality is no higher than their morality.
But your morality is no higher than their morality.
Oh, FFS, I’ve already been doing that.
First, some context, including Garland context:
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The bully taking your lunch money. You’ve got to fight back, even if your scrawny little fists can’t do jack shit, or he’ll keep taking your lunch money. The newly energized Dem base cares about this.
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The value of reasonableness: zero. Garland proved that. He was the reasonable pick. But nobody cared about him personally, and he got lost in the shuffle. We got bupkus for being reasonable. Which is usually the case.
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Though the GOP doesn’t care what the editorial writers of the WaPo and NYT think, the Dems do. The GOP is pretty much willing to do whatever they legally can if it furthers their interests, but the Dems are leery of breaking longstanding rules and norms and traditions, even when the benefit of doing so is obvious, e.g. killing the filibuster entirely in January 2009. This will matter in 2021.
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What happens after a successful (un-nuked) filibuster? A different nominee is put forward. If that nominee is filibustered, another. Do the Dems filibuster a long string of nominees? You haven’t addressed that. I say no, they don’t; by the third nominee if not the second, they throw in the towel.
OK, given that context, let’s look at the game. There are two possibilities over which neither party has any control: there’s another SCOTUS death/retirement this term, or there isn’t.
If there isn’t, and the Dems didn’t filibuster now, it would have been a total loss. They wouldn’t have stood up to the bully, and thereby they would have lost a great deal of the grassroots support that’s been happening this year, and the filibuster would still be waiting for President Gillibrand (or whoever) in 2021.
But they did filibuster now, so they get the grassroots props for having stood up and fought, and President Gillibrand and 50 Dem Senators will be able to put a Dem nominee of her choice on the Court, should the opportunity arise, which it almost certainly will.
If there is, say in 2019:
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If things happened as they did yesterday: then the GOP gets another Justice on the Court in 2019. No way to stop it. But they carry forward the wins from 2017.
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If the Dems hadn’t filibustered this week: the Dems start from behind, having lost a good bit of grassroots enthusiasm and support in April 2017.
But from there, there are two differences, cutting in opposite directions, assuming a Dem filibuster of the 2019 nominee:
a) The GOP nukes the 2019 filibuster, so no filibuster waiting in 2021.
b) The GOP honors the filibuster, in which case it’s still there in 2021.
Then they put another nominee forward, and then another if need be. The second or third doesn’t get 51 votes sustaining a filibuster.
Scoring: In all cases, the Dems are ultimately unsuccessful in blocking the one or two nominees that Trump/Pence gets. Maybe they block a particular nominee in 2019, but they’re all Federalist Society-approved; they’re all just as bad from a Dem perspective. So no difference there.
In some cases, the filibuster is still there in 2021, and in some cases it’s not. +1 for the cases where it’s gone.
In some cases, the Dems kept the faith by fighting the Gorsuch nomination in 2017, and in some cases they didn’t. +1 for the cases they did.
So as things played out, the Dems get +2. In the ‘keep the powder dry’ cases, they get either +1 or 0.
The Democratic base is frothing already, as you say. But the Democratic leadership needs for the base to keep frothing at Republicans and not turn on them instead.
Which is not to say that your overall analysis is flawed - to the contrary, I agree with it. But I would guess the Democratic leadership felt their hands were tied, due to political realities.
The Republican Senators have grabbed the low-hanging fruit. But the whole branch is now falling on them. Which caucus has exercised the filibuster more, the Democratic or the Republican? In their glee to take an apple away from the Democrats, they’ve forgotten that they’re ones who eat the most apples.
The GOP has never used it to block a SCOTUS justice, which is all this action prevents.
Fortas withdrew his name because they couldn’t break the filibuster
So the good news is, they never will. 
But seriously, the filibustering of a SCOTUS nominee is at the intersection of filibustering, and blocking SCOTUS nominees. The GOP has done wholesale filibustering, and last year they blocked a SCOTUS nominee by the simple expedient of never considering his nomination. It’s hard for me to see the fact that the GOP has never before filibustered a SCOTUS nominee as more than an incidental fact.
If the Dems had won 2 more Senate seats in November but still lost the White House, Obama could have resubmitted Garland’s nomination on January 3 to a Dem-controlled Senate (with Biden still veep), which could have rushed through hearings and been ready to vote before January 20. Think the GOP would have filibustered? I’d bet my bottom dollar on it.
The filibuster was useless to them. There is NO WAY the Republicans would not nuke it the moment the Democrats tried to use it. To be fair, the Democrats would probably do the same if the Republicans tried to filibuster their nominee. The loss of the filibuster is an inevitable symptom of today’s partisanship.
And why isn’t retribution for Garland a sufficient principled reason to take a stand?
They used the filibuster to block quite a bit of legislation.
Getting rid of it for SCOTUS may not remove it for legislation, but it certainly opens that door a good bit.
You have no basis for this assumption. The Republicans blocked Garland because they gambled (successfully) that they could gain a seat by holding out for one year. If they lost the election they would have rushed to confirm him. (I wouldn’t have been surprised if Obama would have withdrawn the nomination in favor of a more liberal justice.)
There’s no principle involved other than revenge. Not that revenge is necessarily a bad thing. But taking revenge in a manner which hurts you as much or more than the other guy doesn’t cut it.