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WASHINGTON-- Its a rare and momentous decision - one by one, seated at desks centuries old, senators will stand and cast their votes for a Supreme Court nominee.

Its a difficult political call in the modern era, especially for the 10 Democrats facing tough re-election next year in states that President Donald Trump won.

Resist is the rallying cry for the Democratic Partys liberal base, and that applies to all Trump nominees, even Neil Gorsuch, a mild-mannered jurist who won unanimous Senate backing to the appellate court in 2006. Democratic voters have flooded lawmakers offices with calls, protested outside state offices and tweeted vulgarities if senators even hint at being conciliatory with Trump and the GOP.

I come from a state that no matter how I vote, 50 percent of the people are mad, says Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, who will oppose Gorsuch. So Im kind of used to this. The only difference is that the ones who are happy are really happy.

Already in the minority, Democrats face tough political odds in next years midterms, defending 25 seats for caucus members to the GOPs eight. The looming question for the 10 Democrats is whether a Supreme Court vote will still resonate with voters in 19 months or whether Trumps standing, the economy, jobs or health care would be a greater concern.

Trump won McCaskills state by almost 20 percentage points and conservative groups are running ads against her. But liberals are also fired up.

The January evening Gorsuch was nominated, McCaskill tweeted that there should be a hearing and vote on ANY nominee - a reference to last years Republican blockade of former President Barack Obamas nominee for the same seat, Merrick Garland. She got more than 700 replies, some using curse words and threatening a primary.

Montana Sen. Jon Tester also will oppose Gorsuch, even though his state similarly supported Trump by 20 points. Tester said hes concerned about how Gorsuch would rule on privacy issues and womens health, and whether hed support working people over corporations.

I think that Montanans have always expected me to have a reason for why I voted, and I have plenty of them on Judge Gorsuch, Tester said.

Marlene Johnson, 65, of Helena, said she hopes Testers opposition will hurt him politically. She is closely following the debate and called Gorsuch a decent person who is qualified to sit on the Supreme Court. She says Tester is letting Montana down.

Tester has never won more than 50 percent of the vote. But Republicans are lacking a strong challenger, with their best chance, former Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke, now serving as Trumps interior secretary.

Indiana Sen. Joe Donnelly, North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin had a different calculus - theyre all supporting Gorsuch. Trump won Indiana by 19 points, North Dakota by 36 points and West Virginia by 42 points.

Still, some Democrats are angry. About 20 protesters marched to Donnellys downtown Indianapolis office Tuesday, chanting: No, no, Joe.

North Dakota Democrat Dan Spiekermeier is more understanding of Heitkamp. The farmer said hes upset that Republicans did not allow a vote on Garland, but said some people among the Democrats need to be centrists, so I think she made the right call.

In swing states where Trump had narrower victories, the decision may have been easier. Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey, Florida Sen. Bill Nelson, Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow are all opposing Gorsuch. Trump won those states by a point or less.

Its unclear if their eventual opponents will use the issue against them in 2018 - or if voters will even remember the Supreme Court fight. Florida Gov. Rick Scott, viewed as a likely challenger to Nelson, has so far avoided any direct criticism, though he supports Gorsuch.

In Wisconsin, though, Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who is also up for re-election next year, tweeted to Baldwin in February that pandering to liberal special interests in Washington is more important to you than listening to WI residents.

Others in the state say they are tired of the politics.

Nobody is making any concessions and I think this is going to be the downfall of both parties, said Anna Street, a 56-year-old nurse from West Allis, Wisconsin.

In Ohio, where Trump won by 8 points, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown says he didnt consider the political consequences when he made his decision to oppose Gorsuch the night he was nominated. Most Democrats waited until after his March hearings.

Brown has been the target of a steady stream of attack ads over Gorsuch. And Republican Josh Mandel, making a repeat try at unseating Brown, told supporters in a fundraising email that Browns decision was uninformed, out of touch, knee-jerk politicking.

Brown says he believes Gorsuch will favor corporations over workers and he gets a lot of pushback on both sides on everything.

As for whether voters will still support him, he says: I guess well see, wont we? I think so.

The rest is here:
Democrats in states won by Trump feel pressure ahead of vote on Neil Gorsuch - CBS News

During one of the first big meetings Sen. Kamala Harris attended back in California following her swearing in, she said something many of the progressive activists who look to her as an icon were taken aback to hear.

As the Democratic party tries to claw its way back to control of Congress, she wanted them to at least consider rallying behind some of its most conservative and most vulnerable politicians.

It was a room full of people who did not want to hear that, Harris said Thursday in a meeting with reporters and editors in The Times Washington bureau. They were like, What happened? Why are you saying this?

Amid all the self-reflection and infighting among Democrats about how they find their way out of the wilderness, Harris is emerging as a more nuanced political character than many on either side of the political line expected.

Californias freshman senator, a civil rights crusader whose India-born mother and Jamaica-raised father met during political protests in the Bay Area, is so associated with the identity politics of the left that her Twitter feed was a punchline in a recent Saturday Night Live skit. But as she finds her way in Washington, Harris is embracing an approach somewhat at odds with that image. That became clear as she talked about the path back for Democrats, why she wont unconditionally slam the door on working with Trump, and what her mother told her about people like Supreme Court nominee Neil M. Gorsuch.

The pressure on Harris to unwaveringly fly the flag of the resistance is intense. She recalled the event in Los Angeles where she encouraged supporters not to turn their backs on Sens. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Joe Manchin of West Virginia red-state Democrats some liberal activists would like to purge in their upcoming reelection bids.

We cant afford to be purists, Harris said. You have to ask that question of yourself: Are we going to be purists to this resistance to the point that you let these guys go? Or can you understand that you may not agree with 50% of their policy positions, but I can guarantee you will disagree with 100% of their replacements policy positions. So that is part of the question. What do we have to do in this movement to be pragmatic?

Harris hardly aligns herself with the counter-movement inside Democratic ranks that has pushed to reorient the partys focus more exclusively toward white, working-class voters in places like Scranton, Pa., and Lansing, Mich.

There is this conversation that weve got to go back and get him, she said, referring to the prototypical white, male Trump voter. The inference there is that to do that we need to walk away from that Latina or black mom. That is a mistake.

But she suggested the party has too often seized on wedge, identity politics issues that divide voters. What I do know about those two ladies and that guy is when we wake up at 3 in the morning or something is troubling us, it is never through the lens of, am I Democrat or Republican, or on our identity based on what other people have decided is our identity.

Instead, she said, it is economic issues that weigh on people: their bills, their job troubles, their difficulty getting health insurance.

We, as Democrats and progressives, cannot afford to be guilty of putting people in these narrow boxes based on what we have decided is their identity instead of seeing that they have lived full lives. They are full people, as multifaceted as the other people we know.

She pointed to the incident at a bar outside of Kansas City, Kan., in February in which an attacker shot and killed an Indian immigrant he mistakenly believed to be a Muslim. Patrons in the bar risked their lives trying to protect the victim, she said.

I bet you that patrons in that bar voted for Trump, Harris said. But when presented with that situation, at that moment, without reflection, they did the right thing. We cant afford to put people in boxes.

Harris expected to be taking her post in a very different Washington. Up until late on election night, she said, she had been looking forward to pushing a nationwide expansion of the climate-change initiatives that have taken root in California and taking a leadership role in removing restrictions on immigrants. It was during a private family dinner as votes were being counted across the country that what was confronting her became real. She said she saw her 9-year-old nephew in tears at what was intended to be a celebratory event.

That man cant win, the boy cried. Later, in the reception room where she declared her own victory, she saw similar scenes.

But despite pressure from activists on the left, Harris refuses to rule out working with the White House.

Political capital is something that does not gain interest, she said, when asked how she thought Democrats should respond if the White House offers to collaborate on joint priorities, such as federal money to rebuild outdated roads, bridges and airports. When youve got it, youve got to spend it. If the Trump administration puts in place a real, significant and genuine plan for infrastructure, I'll be down with it.

Some things, though, are non-negotiable, Harris said. She is not among the Democrats lamenting that too much political firepower might have been used fighting Gorsuch, whose confirmation moved forward Thursday after Republican leaders made the historic move of changing Senate rules to step around a Democratic filibuster.

If you look at the decisions this guy has written? Harris said. And everyone presents him as a nice guy. My mother had many sayings. One of them was, Just because somebody has good manners, doesnt make them a good person.

evan.halper@latimes.com

Follow me: @evanhalper

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Sen. Kamala Harris sees a path out of the wilderness for Democrats but can she sell it to them? - Los Angeles Times

IT ISNT ONLY Republicans, it seems, who traffic in alternative facts. Since Donald Trumps shock election victory, leading Democrats have worked hard to convince themselves, and the rest of us, that his triumph had less to do with racism and much more to do with economic anxiety despite almost all of the available evidence suggesting otherwise.

Consider Bernie Sanders, de facto leader of the #Resistance. Some people think that the people who voted for Trump are racists and sexists and homophobes and deplorable folks, he said at a rally in Boston on Friday, alongside fellow progressive senator Elizabeth Warren. I dont agree. Writing in the New York Times three days after the election last November, the senator from Vermont claimed Trump voters were expressing their fierce opposition to an economic and political system that puts wealthy and corporate interests over their own.

Warren agrees with him. There were millions of people across this country who voted for [Trump] not because of his bigotry, but in spite of that bigotry because the system is not working for them economically, the Massachusetts senator told MSNBC last year.

Both Sanders and Warren seem much keener to lay the blame at the door of the dysfunctional Democratic Party and an ailing economy than at the feet of racist Republican voters. Their deflection isnt surprising. Nor is their coddling of those who happily embraced an openly xenophobic candidate. Look, I get it. Its difficult to accept that millions of your fellow citizens harbor what political scientists have identified as racial resentment. The reluctance to acknowledge that bigotry, and tolerance of bigotry, is still so widespread in society is understandable. From an electoral perspective too, why would senior members of the Democratic leadership want to alienate millions of voters by dismissing them as racist bigots?

Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren speak at the Our Revolution Massachusetts Rally at the Orpheum Theatre on March 31, 2017 in Boston.

Photo: Scott Eisen/Getty Images

Facts, however, as a rather more illustrious predecessor of President Trump once remarked, are stubborn things. Interestingly, on the very same day that Sanders offered his evidence-free defense of Trump voters in Boston, the latest data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) was released.

Philip Klinkner, a political scientist at Hamilton College and an expert on race relations, has pored over this ANES data and tells me that whether its good politics to say so or not, the evidence from the 2016 election is very clear that attitudes about blacks, immigrants, and Muslims were a key component of Trumps appeal. For example, he says, in 2016 Trump did worse than Mitt Romney among voters with low and moderate levels of racial resentment, but much better among those with high levels of resentment.

The new ANES data only confirms what a plethora of studies have told us since the start of the presidential campaign: the race was about race. Klinkner himself grabbed headlines last summer when he revealed that the best way to identify a Trump supporter in the U.S. was to ask just one simple question: is Barack Obama a Muslim? Because, he said, if they are white and the answer is yes, 89 percent of the time that person will have a higher opinion of Trump than Clinton. This is economic anxiety? Really?

Other surveys and polls of Trump voters found a strong relationship between anti-black attitudes and support for Trump; Trump supporters being more likely to describe African Americans as criminal, unintelligent, lazy and violent; more likely to believe people of color are taking white jobs; and a majority of them rating blacks as less evolved than whites. Sorry, but how can any of these prejudices be blamed on free trade or low wages?

For Sanders, Warren and others on the left, the economy is what matters most and class is everything. Yet the empirical evidence just isnt there to support them. Yes Trump won a (big) majority of non-college-educated whites, but he also won a majority of college-educated whites, too. He won more young white voters than Clinton did and also a majority of white women; he managed to win white votes regardless of age, gender, income or education. Class wasnt everything in 2016. In a recent essay in The Nation, analysts Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel point out that income predicted support for McCain and Romney, but not Trump. Their conclusion? Racial identity and attitudes have further displaced class as the central battleground of American politics.

Trump supporters take part in a Make America Great Again rally in Salem, Ore., on March 25, 2017.

Photo: Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA/AP

Their view is backed by a detailed Gallup analysis of interviews with a whopping 125,000 Americans, which found that Trump supporters, far from being the left behind or the losers of globalization, earn relatively high household incomes and are no less likely to be unemployed or exposed to competition through trade or immigration. The bottom line for Gallups senior economist Jonathan Rothwell? Trumps popularity cannot be neatly linked to economic hardship.

Look, if you still believe that Trumps appeal was rooted in economic, and not racial, anxiety, ask yourself the following questions: Why did a majority of Americans earning less than $50,000 a year vote for Clinton, not Trump, according to the exit polls? Why, in the key Rust Belt swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, did most voters who cited the economy as the most important issue facing the country opt for Hillary over the Donald? And why didnt black or Latino working class voters flock to Trump with the same fervor as white working class voters? Or does their economic insecurity not count?

To be clear, no one is saying there werent any legitimate economic grievances in Trumpland, nor is anyone claiming that the economy played no role whatsoever. The point, however, is that it wasnt the major motivating factor for most Trump voters or, at least, thats what we learn when we bother to study those voters. Race trumped economics.

Defenders of the economy narrative have a gotcha question of their own: how can racial resentment have motivated Trump supporters when so many of them voted for Barack Obama, across the Rust Belt, in 2008 and 2012? Theyre not racists, filmmaker Michael Moore passionately argued last November. They twice voted for a man whose middle name is Hussein.

Klinkner, though, gives short shrift to this argument. First, he tells me, most of them didnt vote for Obama. There werent many vote switchers between 2012 and 2016. Second, working class whites shifted to Trump less because they were working class than because they were white. Klinkner points out that in 2016, Clinton, unlike Obama, faced a Republican candidate who pushed the buttons of race and nativism in open and explicit ways that John McCain and Mitt Romney were unwilling or unable to do.

People hold signs before a campaign rally for Donald Trump on Feb. 12, 2016 in Tampa, Fla.

Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

If Democrats are going to have any chance of winning back the White House in 2020, they have to understand why they lost in 2016, and that understanding has to be based on facts and figures, however inconvenient or awkward. The Sanders/Warren/Moore wing of the party is right to focus on fair trade and income equality; the calls for higher wages and better regulation are morally and economically correct. What they are not, however, is some sort of silver bullet to solve the issue of racism. As the University of Californias Michael Tesler, author of Post-Racial or Most-Racial? Race and Politics in the Obama Era, has pointed out, the evidence suggests that racial resentment is driving economic anxiety, not the other way around.

Always remember: You have to identify the disease before you can begin work on a cure. In the case of support for Donald Trump, the results are in: It isnt the economy. Its the racism, stupid.

Top photo: Donald Trump greets supporters after a rally on Aug. 21, 2015 in Mobile, Ala.

Read more:
Top Democrats Are Wrong: Trump Supporters Were More Motivated by Racism Than Economic Issues - The Intercept

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Senate Bill 97, introduced byKeith Regier (R-Kalispell) bans the application of foreign law in Montanas courts, with the debate particularly focused on Sharia Law, a form of Islamic law typically used in the Middle East.

Although the bill passed on party lines by 56-44,Democrats claimed it was designed to target Muslim communities.

I think it sends a dangerous message to minority groups both here living in our state and wanting to come visit our state, just merely on the fact that you may be different, said Rep. Shane Morigeau, D-Missoula, while debating the bill. I truly believe this law is repugnant. I believe this is not who we are as Montanans.

Meanwhile,Rep. Ellie Hill Smith (D-Missoula) proposed a failed amendment to the bill to include a ban on both Sharia Law and the Law of Moses, in order to show the state of Montana that it is not just about Islamic Law.

The courts have said that laws that single out certain religions violate the First Amendment, Smith said, claiming that it was peppered with anti-Muslim bigotry.

Another Democrat,Rep. Laurie Bishop (D-Livingston) urged legislators not to forget the roots of this bill, adding that our children are watching.

Meanwhile, Rep. Brad Tschida (R-Missoula) said the bill was an attempt to push back against a constitution [that] is constantly under assault.

Bills specifically targeting Sharia Law have passed in statessuch as North Carolina, Alabama, Arizona, Kansas, Louisiana, South Dakota, and Tennessee. The bill will now be passed on to Gov. Steve Bullock (D) for signature or veto.

You can follow Ben Kew on Facebook, on Twitter at @ben_kew,oremail him at bkew@breitbart.com

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US|Fist or Glove: California Democrats Debate Response to Trump - New York Times