Among recent Supreme Court nominees, President Barack Obama’s choices of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan each received more than 60 votes. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)It is not clear that Democrats have the votes to block Gorsuch and to keep Republicans from changing the chamber’s way of doing business. In the last 47 years of Supreme Court nominations — spanning the appointments of the 16 most recent justices — only Alito was forced to clear the 60-vote procedural hurdle to break a filibuster. “Judge Gorsuch was closely involved in developing and defending these claims,” Jameel Jaffer, head of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, told the committee. that Judge Gorsuch happened to be a government lawyer at a time when the government — his client — endorsed torture and a sweeping view of presidential power.

Source: Washington Post March 23, 2017 13:13 UTC