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Charles Schumer, the leader of the Senate minority, has said that he will ask Democrats to filibuster the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch. In response to that request, the Senate Democrats have four options. Each of them has considerable appeal, but each also runs into significant objections.

1: Return to normal order. At least since the unsuccessful nomination of Judge Robert Bork in 1987, Supreme Court nominations have been highly politicized and occasionally ugly, and the situation has been getting worse. Before Borks defeat, it would have been possible to say that so long as a Supreme Court nominee meets basic tests of character and competence, the Senate will confirm him -- and that members of the opposing party will not mount a serious protest. After all, Antonin Scalia was confirmed by a vote of 98-0 in 1986.

At least on some days, a principled Democratic senator might be tempted to think: Lets stop this, here and now. Judge Gorsuch clearly passes the character and competence tests. Thats that. An advantage of this approach is it might reduce partisan contestation over Supreme Court nominees in the future.

The chief objection is that if youre in a real fight, and if the national stakes are high, unilateral disarmament can be a terrible idea. After the Republicans disgraceful refusal even to allow a hearing for Judge Merrick Garland, should the Democrats suddenly capitulate, when there is no guarantee that Republicans will ever show reciprocity? Wheres the good in that?

2: Return to normal order -- while rejecting judicial extremists. Democrats might call a halt to the confirmation wars of recent years and return to the approach they embraced during the Bork nomination. Sure, presidents are entitled to deference, but the Senate need not confirm people who are out of the mainstream. Robert Bork, no; Anthony Kennedy, yes.

Democrats could endorse this approach while sincerely insisting on the need to return to normal order, and while signaling to the White House and to Senate Republicans that they are prepared to be reasonable. In one version of this approach, Democrats might even vote to confirm Judge Gorsuch on the ground that he is a distinguished nominee who falls within the mainstream. In another version, Democrats might vote a firm but nonetheless gracious and respectful no (without resorting to the filibuster), carefully engaging with the nominees record to argue that he has not established that he is a mainstream figure.

The appeal of an approach of this sort is it could well reduce the intensity of future confirmation battles, while leaving the Democrats room to fight hard against genuinely unacceptable picks. But the objection is obvious: It might seem to be another form of capitulation, especially in the immediate aftermath of the Garland fiasco.

3: Protect liberty and equality on principle. For many Democrats, the issue is simple. In view of the immense importance of Supreme Court nominations on the most fundamental questions -- racial justice, privacy, executive power, gun control, campaign finance -- it is perfectly appropriate for senators to oppose nominees on the ground that they disapprove of their likely judgments, above all if those judgments would be destructive to liberty and equality.

From this point of view, partisan battles over Supreme Court nominations are a reasonable response to the centrality of the Supreme Court to American life -- and to the fact that political convictions inevitably affect the justices votes. Democrats can explain to the public that their full-throated opposition is principled, in the sense that it depends on what the nominee is likely to do.

The appeal of this position is that it is refreshingly candid. The objection is that it acknowledges that confirmation wars are here to stay, which would be pretty terrible news.

4: Its all about political power. The Republicans success in blocking the Garland nomination might mean that with respect to Supreme Court nominations, the only real question now is: Do you have the votes?

If Hillary Clinton had been elected president, and nominated someone as far to the left as Judge Gorsuch is to the right, there is no question that Republicans would have done whatever they could to stop that nominee. They used their power to block Judge Garland. Why shouldn't Democrats do the same?

The best answer is that two wrongs do not make a right. The system for confirming Supreme Court justices is badly broken, and if you insist that its all about power, it will stay that way.

For this reason, we should rule the fourth approach out of bounds. And under current conditions, no Democrat is likely to be drawn to the first.

That leaves the second and third options, and, for many Democrats, the choice between the two will not be obvious. But in my view, the balance of considerations favors some version of the second. It reflects a sensible understanding of the system of separation of powers, and it would be a form of statesmanship. We can certainly use some of that.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story: Cass R Sunstein at csunstein1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Katy Roberts at kroberts29@bloomberg.net

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The Best Option for Democrats on Gorsuch - Bloomberg

New York Times

To Win Again, Democrats Must Stop Being the Abortion Party New York Times When I came to this country from Ireland some 45 years ago, a cousin, here 15 years before, advised me that Catholics vote Democratic. Having grown up in the Irish Republic, I was well disposed to Republican Party principles like local autonomy and ... and more »

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To Win Again, Democrats Must Stop Being the Abortion Party - New York Times

New York Times

Insults Fly Between Democrats in New York Senate, Underscoring Rift New York Times In mid-March, Senator Michael N. Gianaris, a Queens Democrat, accused a group of eight breakaway Democrats, who have partnered with the Senate Republicans, of being President Trump's New York Democrats happy to eat the crumbs from the ... and more »

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Insults Fly Between Democrats in New York Senate, Underscoring Rift - New York Times

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

On February 7, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was reading a letter critical of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), then the nominee for attorney general, when the Senate's top Republican forced her to stop. Invoking an obscure Senate rule against disparaging colleagues, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)had Warren ejected from the Senate chamber. Minutes later, she appeared on MSNBC and #letlizspeak began trending on Twitter. Warren then read the full letterwhich had been written by Coretta Scott King in 1986on Facebook Live. By the next morning, the Facebook video had been viewed more than 5 million times.

McConnell, known as one of the savviest political operators in Washington, appeared to have made an uncharacteristic mistake. Rather than silence Warren's message, he made it go viral. McConnell defended his decision that night by stating that he had warned Warren but "nevertheless, she persisted"a phrase Warren's supporters have now emblazoned on apparel, mugs, and their bodies as tattoos.

But there were some who theorized that McConnell was, as ever, two steps ahead. Reporters and pundits debated whether McConnell had intentionally elevated Warren's public profile because he wants the Democratic Party to be defined by one of its most liberal members. Not long after, a report inPolitico corroborated this theory: Republicans have decided to use Warren as a sort of boogeyman ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, when 10 Democratic senators are up for reelection in states Donald Trump won. By late February, the committee tasked with electing Republicans to the Senate launched digital ads attacking vulnerable Democrats by stating how often they had voted with Warren.

At a time of division within their party, Republicans believe the best strategy is to unite against a common foe. Without Barack Obama in the White House, they need someone else to run against in 2018. Warren, a household name and an unapologetic liberal, is an easy choice. Ford O'Connell, a Republican strategist in Washington, DC, says going after Warren is part of the Republican playbook for 2020, as well. "Always define your opponent before your opponent can define you," he says. And taking on Warren now, O'Connell suggests, will hurt her chances if she becomes her party's presidential nominee in 2020.

What's strange about Warren is that both parties seem to agree that she should be in the spotlight.

A law professor who studied bankruptcy and debt, Warren arrived on the political scene in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. She pushed the federal government to set up an agency to protect ordinary Americans from unfair practices by Wall Street and other industriesan effort that led to the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In the Senate, she voted down Obama's nominees whom she considered too cozy with Wall Street. She has championed issues like student loan reform and raising the minimum wage that Democrats believe will appeal to voters charmed by Trump, who has already endangered his populist reputation by filling his Cabinet with mega-rich Wall Street alumni.

What's strange about Warren is that both parties seem to agree that she should be in the spotlight. Democrats say they welcome Republicans' decision to elevate one of their most populist voices. Ultimately, they believe Republicans' strategy will backfire because Warren's reputation and message resonate across the country. "Elizabeth Warren was Bernie Sanders before Bernie Sanders," says Mary Anne Marsh, a Democratic strategist in Massachusetts. "When you look at her first race here [for the Senate in 2012], she tapped into much of the sort of populist economic anxiety that a lot of people had here in Massachusetts. That's not going to go away."

And if red-state Democrats are afraid of Warren's progressive reputation, they don't show it. Warren has visited Republican-leaning states on behalf of Democratic candidates, from Kentucky (where she helped McConnell's challenger, Alison Lundergan Grimes, in 2014) to Ohio (where she campaigned for Hillary Clinton last year).

One of the best examples is her work on behalf of Jason Kander, who ran a surprisingly close race last year for the US Senate in Missouri against incumbent Republican Roy Blunt. In 2018, Missouri's Democratic senator, Claire McCaskill, is up for reelection, and the Warren-as-boogeyman strategy could be tested there. As early as 2015, Warren sent out emails on behalf of Kander. She held fundraisers and flew to Missouri for a last-minute rally. "Sen. Warren's profile being raised is not a bad thing for the party at all," says Abe Rakov, Kander's campaign manager. "I think she's a very, very good messenger for the party, and I think it showed in Missouri."

Of course, Kander lost, as did Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky and Clinton in Ohio. But Warren consistently drew some of the biggest crowds, and Rakov says her presence was only a benefit to the campaign. "After she was here, we saw our volunteer numbers go up, we saw our fundraising go up," he recalls. Over the course the election, he says, Kander's campaign had built up "a lot of evidence that it was sort of a Republican myth that she would cause us problems." (Her fundraising prowess was evident after McConnell kicked her off the Senate floor, when a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee email about the incident helped the group shatter previous fundraising records.)

But if Republicans are able to cast her as a typical liberal zealot rather than a populist messenger, their strategy of running against her makes sense. "She has been very polarizing along party lines, even in Massachusetts," says Steve Koczela, a pollster in Boston. He agrees that Warren's message probably resonates with some Trump voters on a policy level but says that is unlikely to endear her to them. "Logic doesn't always apply when evaluating partisan actors these days," he says. "It's more, do people see you as with them or with the other team?"

Simply raising Warren's profile may not be enough to turn white working-class voterswhose support in Rust Belt states was key to Trump's electoral victoryagainst her and the Democratic Party. Roland "Butch" Taylor, a retired welder and pipefitter in northeast Ohio, supported Clinton in 2016, but many of his peers and fellow union members backed Trump. When asked about Warren, he immediately brought up the episode on the Senate floor. "When they gaveled her on the Senate floor, what did she do?" he said. "She didn't go back in the back and pout. She went right to the cameras and started her own speech in front of American people." Rather than show her as an out-of-touch liberal, Taylor said, the episode convinced him "that's the kind of leader you need." He thinks Clinton might have done better in the Ohio Rust Belt if Warren had been on the ticket with her. "She would make a great candidate for the party for 2020," he said.

That's exactly what Democrats are counting onthat Warren's persona and message will appeal beyond the party's progressive base and coastal and urban strongholds. But O'Connell says he isn't worried about Warren's populist message undercutting Republicans. Warren's support for environmental regulations, he believes, provides a wedge issue Republicans can use to hold onto working-class white voters who supported Trump in November. "What you're seeing here is a potential collision between environmentalists, which Warren loves, and big labor," he says. Taylor, whose livelihood depended on the oil and gas industries in Ohio, would be a good target of that strategy. He even qualified his praise for Warren by stressing that her appeal is contingent on her support for energy-sector jobs.

Ultimately, Democrats and Republicans simply disagree on the extent and geography of Warren's popularity. Democrats think she can attract support across the country and that her ability to fire up the base is an asset that Clinton lacked in 2016. Republicans believe her appeal is limited to her base. "The one thing I think that Republicans are betting on, should she actually become the Democratic presidential nominee," O'Connell says, "is that she isn't going to be able to come up with a message that is unifying for all 50 states."

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Republicans Are Trying to Raise Elizabeth Warren's Profile. So Are Democrats. - Mother Jones

House Democrats held a news conference to claim a "victory for the Affordable Care Act", after the Republicans' decided to pull their healthcare bill ahead of a scheduled vote. (Reuters)

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), a freshman from a safe seat in Chicagos suburbs, was just about to deliver his speech against theAmerican Health Care Act when he heard a commotion on the House floor. The bill was being pulled. Democrats, who up until that moment thought the Republicans might yank a rabbit out of the hat, began celebrating, andKrishnamoorthi thought back to election night, when he learned that he would be coming to Washington with President Trump.

I thought this repeal bill would sail through, he said. It was the presidents number one priority. And what was incredible about this process was the phone calls we had 1,959 phone calls in opposition to the American Health Care Act. We had 30 for it.

On Friday afternoon, as congressional Democrats learned that the GOP had essentially given up on repealing the Affordable Care Act, none of them took the credit. They had never really cohered around an anti-AHCA message. (As recently as Wednesday, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi was still using the phrase make America sick again, which most Democrats had abandoned.) Theyd been sidelined legislatively, as Republicans tried to pass a bill on party lines. Theyd never called supporters to the Capitol for a show of force, as Republicans had done, several times, during the 2009-2010 fight to pass the Affordable Care Act.

Instead, Democrats watched as a roiling, well-organized resistance bombarded Republicans with calls and filled their town hall meetings with skeptics. TheIndivisible coalition, founded after the 2016 election by former congressional aides who knew how to lobby their old bosses, was the newest and flashiest. But it was joined by MoveOn, which reported 40,000 calls to congressional offices from its members; by Planned Parenthood, directly under the AHCAs gun; by the Democratic National Committee, fresh off a divisive leadership race; and by the AARP, which branded the bill as an age tax before Democrats had come up with a counterattack.

Congressional Democrats did prime the pump. After their surprise 2016 defeat, they made Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) the outreach director of the Senate caucus. Sanderss first project was Our First Stand, a series of rallies around the country, organized by local Democrats and following a simple format. Elected officials would speak; they would then pass the microphone to constituents who had positive stories to tell about the ACA.

What were starting to do, for the first time in the modern history of the Democratic Party, is active grass-roots organizing, Sanders said in a January interview. Were working with unions, were working with senior groups, and were working with health-care groups. Were trying to rally the American people so we can do what they want. And that is not the repeal of the Affordable Care Act.

The turnout for the rallies exceeded expectations, though their aggregate total, over 70-odd cities, would be dwarfed by the Womens March one week later. More importantly, they proved thatthere was a previously untapped well of goodwill for the ACA which had polled negatively for seven years and it smoothed over divisions inside the party. Days after Barack Obama had blamed Bernie Sanders supporters for undermining support for the ACA, Sanders was using his campaign mailing list to save the law.

It was the town halls, and the stories, that convinced me that people might actually stop this bill, said Tom Perriello, a former Democratic congressman now running an insurgent campaign for governor of Virginia, with his career-ending vote for the ACA front and center.

The outsider approach to lobbying grew from there, in ways that quickly came to worry Republicans. Indivisible-affiliated groups advertised congressional town halls and flooded them. Like the Jan. 14 rallies, the town hall tactic mirrored what the tea party movement did in 2009. Like the Democrats of that year, many Republicans responded glibly, blaming out-of-state (or district) rabble-rousers and searching for the invisible hand of George Soros. Among the Republicans who took the protests seriously was Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), who would go on to oppose AHCA from the right.

I dont know if were going to be able to repeal Obamacare now because these folks who support Obamacare are very active, Brooks told a radio host in February. Theyre putting pressure on congressman and theres not a counter-effort to steel the spine of some of these congressmen in tossup districts around the country.

Beltway groups were helping organize the opposition, and did not pretend otherwise. But they were effective because they had actual grass-roots buy-in. Elizabeth Juviler co-founded anIndivisible groupin the district of Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.). Hed never taken a position against the party, Juviler said in an interview. By all accounts, hes an affable person, but he wasnt accessible.

The group, NJ11th for Change, birddogged the Republican congressman with two tactics. First, it held mock town hall events in all four of the counties he represented. Thousands of people showed, according to Juviler; all were informed of how to call his office. When the health-care bill was dropped,Frelinghuysen was besieged with calls. And on Friday, he announced that he would oppose AHCA. According to Joe Dinkin, a spokesman for the Working Families Party, there were dozens of stories like that.

For the first time in a long time, a pretty sizable number of Republicans were more scared of grass-roots energy of the left than of primaries on the right, said Dinkin.

Helpless to defeat the bill with their numbers and not even consulted by Republicans who intended to push it through Democrats counted on the grass-roots energy to grind the majority down. There was no big rally at the Capitol, because the activism in districts was seen as more effective.

Those big rallies get a lot of media coverage, but theyre not effective, said Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), the co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

This week, as Republicans fumbled the AHCA, Democrats held relatively low-key events to draw attention to their fight. At each, they credited activists with slowing down the bill and derided Republicans for being led by Trumps whims.

Organizers had a first victory today, said Rep. Primila Jayapal (D-Wash.), at a small CPC rally after the bills delay Thursday. Across the country, they pummeled Republicans for this horrible bill.

And when the bill was pulled, Pelosi joined a rally of just a few dozen people across from the Capitol, organized by MoveOn.org. She took off her heels and led the crowd in a literal jump for joy, as the members of her emboldened caucus began fundraising off the Republican failure.

You organized across the country, read a fundraising email from Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) after the vote. You showed up to Republicans townhalls and told them your stories about the ACA saving your life. You called your Representatives and asked them to vote no. Members of Congress reported receiving thousands of calls from constituents almost uniformly against repeal.

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Left out of AHCA fight, Democrats let their grass roots lead and win - Washington Post