QFT
I would urge you to take a course in reading comprehension.
Drum roll, please…
Pretty harsh, but in this case justified. :o
My apologies.
It’s done. 54-45.
Senate grants Advice and Consent to Gorsuch’s nomination.
Just a tiny bit fo paperwork and he’ll take his seat at the Supreme Court.
Indeed, the tree of liberty has been uprooted, and the tradition of bipartisan accommodation plunged further into a vegetative state, awaiting its final composting. 
Just in time to hear Trinty!
Yeah, “you might want to re-read my post” (which you did, so we’re good) would have sufficed; sorry about being heavy-handed there. I have to learn to resist the temptation of the cutting remark when it really isn’t called for.
Pardon a dumb question, but if the Republicans can nuke-change the rules to 51 Senators = confirmation, what prevents them from simply changing the rules up to “100 votes required for SCOTUS confirmation” shortly before a Democratic majority/POTUS takes power, to prevent a liberal SCOTUS justice from getting in?
If a Democratic majority takes power, they can change the rules back to 51 as soon as they take power.
It seems to me, nothing. The rules are whatever they say they are. For example, we now have a new rule that presidents cannot nominate justices in the final year of their term (or, more accurately, they can nominate, but the nominee will not be confirmed). I would like for senators to inform the public what other powers vested in the president expire prior to the end of his/her term.
Who was absent?
Well, it’s a little fuzzy, so I doubt you’ll get a specific list, but have you heard the term “lame duck” before?
Your own words show the flaw: or, more accurately, they can nominate, but the nominee will not be confirmed. The President’s power to nominate is unchanged. The President’s power to confirm never existed. That was always the Senate’s, and still is.
A Republican senator from Georgia, Johnny Isakson, did not vote. No idea why.
Heitkamp (D-ND), Manchin (D-WV), and Donolley (D-IN) crossed the aisle to vote in favor of the nomination. Otherwise it was straight party line.
Thanks. Isakson has been recovering from back surgery.
I specifically said without using what happened to Judge Garland as a basis. Fail.
This is not an argument in favor of doing something. And contrary to your assertion, reasonableness does have potential value. The Republicans almost lost control of the Senate, and in some cases, the way Judge Garland was treated was part of why a Republican incumbent was fighting for his/her life.
Amazingly, the Democrats didn’t care bupkis about what editorial writers thought in 2013, nor were they “leery of breaking longstanding rules and norms and traditions.” Your viewpoint here is tainted by your politics. You view Republicans as unprincipled, and Democrats as much more principled. There is little actual evidence that either is true.
Not sure what your point here is. When is this filibuster taking place? In the future? While we don’t know for certain what happens with a successful filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee (since it’s never been done before), we do have close analogies. Abe Fortas, for example. Robert Bork, for another. We currently have a middle-of-the-road Justice who is the swing vote on most cases precisely because the Democrats successfully blocked two more conservative justices from being approved. Other examples abound.
“Stand up to the bully.” I keep trying to point out that this plays only to the most ardent Democratic base. And what’s the point of doing so in April of 2017, when elections won’t be happening for another almost two years? Do you really think that people going to the voting booth in Nov. 2018 are going to be making decisions based upon the fact that the Democrats were wiling to “stand up to the bully”? If so, you’ve got some very skewed thinking, I believe.
As for 2021, the Democrats would have been quite willing to dump the filibuster regardless of what they did here, if Republicans were willing to employ it to block a moderate nominee. And they would have had some better reasoning even than the Republicans did yesterday: “We didn’t filibuster in 2017, because we didn’t think that was responsible use of the tactic, and we didn’t want to force you to remove it. So why are you now being the jerks?”
This is amazingly poor reasoning. How are the Democrats going to lose “a good bit of grassroots enthusiasm and support” if they didn’t filibuster? Do you really believe that? With Donald Trump on the throne??? With almost daily reasons to be politically (if not morally) outraged? Get real.
Dealt with this above. And I will point out that the likelihood of peeling off enough Republicans to block removal of the filibuster is much greater if the President nominates someone down the road who is more conservative than Judge Gorsuch, a possibility I consider very likely now that the filibuster is gone. There are some scarily reactionary judges out there. Worse, there’s always the possibility of a Trump crony being nominated.
Your scoring is, of course, incorrect, unless we accept your viewpoints on things like “kept the faith”, etc. In all your looking at the scenarios, you’ve failed to identify any advantage to doing what they did yesterday other than “stand up to the bully” and putative rallying of the base from that (which, as you will notice, I said you needed to ignore if you were to convince me to change my mind). You’ve also failed to identify any downsides to letting the filibuster survive, other than the possibility of losing a chance to “stand up to the bully” (again, the same stuff). And let’s point out that you totally avoided the possibility of a second nomination in 2018, which is not an unlikely scenario, and one in which MY point about WHEN to “rally the base” becomes much more accurate. 
While it is the sitting president’s prerogative to make nominations right up to the last minute of his/her term, realistically any nominee for any office will not be acted upon at some point simply due to time constraints.
If a SCOTUS justice had died at 11:59am on January 20th then Obama would have been well within his right to nominate someone. Expecting the Senate to act in the one minute remaining in Obama’s term at that point would not have been realistic.
How far before the end of a president’s term this line of practical impossibility might be drawn is certainly debatable. In the early days of the United States there were instances where a confirmation vote was taken in the Senate the very day the president made a nomination. But as a practical matter such has not been the common practice of the Senate in many years.
Is it my imagination, or are the stories you cite 80 years old? Do you think the nature of America’s partisan politics has changed little over even one or two decades, let alone eight?
You might want to ask the Mods to change your username to Rip Van Winkle.
Gorsuch was nominated on January 31 confirmed on April 7
Kagan was nominated on May 10 and confirmed on August 5
Sotomayor was nominated on May 26 and confirmed on August 6
Alito was nominated on October 31 and confirmed on January 31
Roberts was gooofy because he first got nominated for Associate Justice and then Chief Justice
The recent norm seems to be ~2-3 months.