From Politico:
As Barack Obama prepares to nominate his first Supreme Court justice, conservative activists have three words for Senate Republicans: Lock and load.
While conservatives know that they can’t defeat Obama’s nominee without massive Democratic defections, they nevertheless want to see their senators come out with their guns blazing.
“Republicans in the House have gone a long way [toward satisfying conservatives] with votes on the stimulus,” says Gary Bauer, president of the anti-abortion, anti-gay-marriage group American Values. “But when it comes to the Senate, there are still a lot of people not convinced that … what people expect is for them to carry the banner of our philosophy as boldly and with as much confidence as the other side does.”
“The other side does not agonize about whether they are going to give a Republican Supreme Court nominee a difficult time, they just do it.”
Also from Politico:
Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), who also sits on the Judiciary Committee, acknowledged that the 59-40 majority Democrats hold in the Senate makes it it extremely difficult for the GOP to successfully filibuster, which would require 60 votes to break.
“Let’s be clear: Republicans don’t have the votes to filibuster a nominee, and that’s probably not going to happen in this case either,” Kyl said on “Fox News Sunday.”
If the Republicans cannot sustain a filibuster will they even force a cloture vote? I think you can be 100% certain that they will. All it takes is one senator to refuse to grant consent to move to a vote on confirmation to create a cloture vote. Someone like Jim Inhofe or Jim DeMint will surely object and force a cloture vote. Therefore, the Republicans will filibuster Obama’s nominee. The problem is that they won’t even come close to succeeding. There is no way to make their base happy on this. Well, actually, they would make the base happy if they unanimously voted to deny cloture. But that isn’t going to happen. There are going to try to score points with their base by merely complaining. That won’t work. But maybe they can dupe their base into giving them a bunch of money to complain.
