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At 6:45 ET Tuesday evening, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) headed to the Senate floor to start talking about why he was opposed to the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court "for as long as I am able." He has enough stamina, and enough material, that he's still going strong more than 13 hours later.
"By stealing a Supreme Court seat for the first time in American history, the Senate is undermining the Court and the rule of law, and turning the highest court in the land into a political committee," Merkley wrote on his official Facebook page. "This assault on our democracy demands as robust a resistance as we can possibly mount."
Merkley began speaking around 7 p.m. Tuesday, lambasting his Republican colleagues over their refusal to hold a vote on Judge Merrick Garland during the administration of President Barack Obama.
"The majority team in this chamber decided to steal a Supreme Court seat.... The majority said, 'We intend to pack the court of the United States of America,'" he said. "It was a warfare tactic of partisanship."
As the protest neared its eighth hour early Wednesday morning, the senator pointed to Gorsuch's past rulings that some have deemed anti-women and anti-worker, including his decision in the Hobby Lobby case that found businesses don't have to provide contraceptive services to their employees.
A cloture vote will still happen on Thursday, when Democrats will have the votes to block it going forward. At that point, Mitch McConnell will have the votes to end their filibuster, change the rules and go nuclear. Republicans will then successfully steal this Supreme Court seat. "The Republican Senate changed the rules of confirmation drastically by refusing even to consider Judge Merrick Garland's nomination and against the odds it's paid off for them," Merkley said in his 13th hour. "It's interesting because we talk about the nuclear option of changing the rules, but in a very de facto manner, the nuclear option went off the day the majority leader came to the floor and said we're going to conduct ourselves in a totally different way than the Senate's ever conducted itself. Unlike every other time in U.S. history when there was a vacancy during an election year and the Senate acted, we're not going to act. We're going to essentially engage in stonewalling the president's nominee, no hearing, no discussion. That was a nuclear option."
Merkely is showing how the Senate is supposed to work through his stand on the Senate floor. He's highlighting the sham that is the Republicans' claims that it's Democrats who are damaging the institution of the Senate by "forcing" them to go nuclear on the Supreme Court. He's exposing Mitch McConnell and the lemmings in his conference that will follow him over the cliff.