WASHINGTON — “Hell no, Kavanaugh,” erupted the shouts outside the U.S. Supreme Court shortly after the primetime revelation that President Trump had nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh, 53, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to the nation’s highest court. As night deepened, the crowd grew — and grew louder. The vast majority of those gathered on First Street, in sight of the Capitol’s glittering dome, were firmly in the anti-Trump camp, as evidenced by their signs: “What’s at Stake? LGBTQ Rights, Roe v. Wade, Health Care”; “Stop Trump’s Supreme Court Takeover”; “I Stand With Planned Parenthood.” And though the nomination wasn’t yet an hour old, “Stop Kavanaugh” signs also flourished.
There is little reason to expect such passion to subside anytime soon. In fact, Democrats both on and off Capitol Hill have been plotting a multipronged strategy to accomplish what most experts have said would be impossible for a minority party in a post-filibuster age. They hope to #StopKavanaugh, as one of the movement’s newly minted hashtags would have it — and #SaveSCOTUS from shifting decisively rightward for a generation or more in the process.
“I think this will be an enormous fight, and it should be,” Senate expert Ira Shapiro told Yahoo News. In a conversation shortly before the announcement of Trump’s nomination, Shapiro, author of The Last Great Senate, said he was skeptical about any “procedural obstruction” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, might attempt. “I think that Sen. McConnell would change every rule of the Senate if necessary to ensure that the nomination is voted upon,” Shapiro said, referring to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. “Ultimately, the only way to defeat this nomination is by making the most comprehensive case about the constitutional rights that are at stake and the future of the court for the next 30 years.”
Senate Democrats no longer have the option to torpedo Kavanaugh outright, thanks to the GOP’s controversial 2017 decision to lower the longstanding 60-vote threshold for Supreme Court nominees to a simple majority. Because Democrats currently control only 49 Senate seats, they can’t just band together and block Trump’s pick.
Even so, they do have options — and they intend to use them. In the days and weeks ahead, there will be nationwide grassroots organizing. There will be complex parliamentary maneuvering. There will be raw political pressure applied to a handful of senators — two pro-choice Republicans and three red-state Democrats — who could make or break Kavanaugh’s nomination. And there will be tens of millions of dollars spent on the battle.
“Progressives are very mobilized over the Supreme Court in a way that I haven’t seen for a long time,” Neera Tanden of the liberal Center for American Progress told Yahoo News on Tuesday evening. Tanden said the “kabuki theater” that has been the recent confirmation process, in which nominees are allowed to reveal little of their actual judicial philosophy, must end. And she called on two moderate Republican women, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, to stand by their support for abortion rights, which some believe are under threat with an increasingly conservative Supreme Court. “Activists and advocates have to hold their feet to the fire,” Tanden said, wondering if the two would want to be responsible, however indirectly, for having overturned the Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortion.