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The Opinion Pages | OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Mitch McConnells Nuclear Trigger

Finger
By ADAM JENTLESON APRIL 3, 2017
In the 1944 noir film Gaslight, a villain hides his crimes by convincing his
innocent wife shes insane, feeding her barely perceptible lies and altering small
aspects of her environment until she doubts her own instincts and observations.

Senate Republicans are attempting the same scheme on their Democratic

counterparts, trying to convince them and the rest of the world that if
Republicans invoke whats known as the nuclear option to confirm Judge Neil
Gorsuch as a Supreme Court justice, it would be the Democrats who were
responsible not the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, the man who
would pull the trigger.

No one should fall for Republicans trickery. Democrats are right to embrace
their principled opposition to Judge Gorsuch and remember that however Mr.
McConnell chooses to respond, it will be his decision alone.

Going nuclear, or changing Senate rules to make a Supreme Court

confirmation possible with a simple majority, would be a hugely disproportionate
response to reasonable Democratic opposition and will expose Mr. McConnells
much-ballyhooed institutionalism as the fraud it has always been.

Democrats have come by their opposition to Judge Gorsuch honestly. In private

conversations and meetings with progressive groups, many senators who knew
that Judge Gorsuch would rule in a way they wouldnt like on every major issue
they care about nevertheless made it clear that they entered the judiciary
committee hearings willing to be persuaded to support him, or at least not stand
in his way.
 That openness caused a great deal of frustration among progressives, who
pressed Democrats for more forceful opposition. But Democratic senators made
clear that they wanted to give Judge Gorsuch the fair hearing that Republicans
had denied Judge Merrick Garland.

Instead of seizing this opportunity in his confirmation hearings, Judge

Gorsuch alienated one Democratic senator after another with his smug and
evasive demeanor. He took his strategy of avoiding missteps to the extreme and
neglected to provide senators with the substantive answers they deserve.

The result, according to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, was an

almost seismic shift in the caucus against Judge Gorsuch. Also of note: The week
of Judge Gorsuchs hearings began with the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey,
testifying that President Trumps campaign was under investigation for possibly
colluding with a hostile foreign power.

Democrats saw a nominee whose ideology is, by some accounts, farther to

the right than Justice Antonin Scalias, nominated for a lifetime appointment on
the nations highest court by a president whose White House is ensnared in an
F.B.I. investigation. Those are not exactly circumstances conducive to bipartisan
cooperation.

Rather than accept Democrats opposition as legitimate, Senator McConnell

is dead set on escalation. The view among veteran McConnell watchers is he has
already decided to go nuclear. For a man who chooses his words carefully, Mr.
McConnells saying that Judge Gorsuch will be confirmed on Friday is
tantamount to saying that he intends to go nuclear if Democrats block the
confirmation on the floor.

If Senator McConnell decides to immediately reach for the nuclear option,

that will be rash for two main reasons.

First, when Democrats eliminated filibusters for most presidential

nominations going nuclear themselves in 2013, they did so in the face of
obstruction on a far greater scale than anything Mr. McConnell has faced as
majority leader. By the time Democrats exercised the nuclear option, Senator
McConnell had unleashed nearly 500 filibusters and spent years twisting
Republicans arms to prevent them from working with Democrats, regardless of
the substance of a given issue, in pursuit of his goal of denying President Obama a
second term.

In one revealing interview, Mr. McConnell explained that he persuaded

moderate Republicans who were inclined to work with Democrats on the
Affordable Care Act into opposition because if the proponents of the bill were
able to say it was bipartisan, it tended to convey to the public that this is O.K.,
they must have figured it out.

Senator McConnells insight was that even if the substance of a given bill was
bipartisan, the bill would be labeled partisan as long as he enforced a party-line
vote. And he was right.

Second, even after Republican obstruction had become a sad fact of Senate
life, Senator Harry Reid tried for years to avert the nuclear option. He worked
with Republicans such as Lamar Alexander of Tennessee to devise numerous
gentlemens agreements to make the Senate work more efficiently. When those
efforts failed, the nuclear option was a last resort.

Even though the word institutionalist is frequently uttered in the same

breath as Senator McConnells name, nothing could be further from the truth. No
institutionalist would abide so many filibusters or deny a qualified nominee like
Judge Garland a hearing.

The majority leader has made no real effort to avert the nuclear option. To
the contrary, he appears to be itching to pull the trigger and in his insidious
way, he wants to convince Democrats that itll be their fault when he does.
Democrats must refuse to be gaslit. They should stand by their principles and
stand firm in their opposition to Judge Gorsuch.

If Senator McConnell blows up Senate rules to jam through President

Trumps nominee, he will be exposed as the radical that he truly is.

Adam Jentleson, a former deputy chief of staff to Senator Harry Reid, is the senior
strategic adviser at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

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