Senator King is one of those 25 up for reelection in 2018. Maine voted Democrat in 2016. On March 5, King faced a New England town-hall crowd critical of his vacillation about their demand that he prevent Gorsuch from becoming the fifth horseman needed to resume the Roberts Court ride toward the plutocratic apocalypse. Their demand helped to ultimately carry the day, persuading King that there may be consequences at next year's polls if he voted for cloture.
The right vote to rescue democracy from the swamp is "no" on cloture for the Gorsuch filibuster, and then also "no" against changing the filibuster rule. Any Senator who has a different priority on these two votes than rescuing democracy from the current corrupt Swamp of plutocracy should be removed to make way for progress.
Independents fled from Clinton, thinking Trump was a better bet to drain the swamp, or at least no more competent in filling the swamp than was the well-practiced Clinton ring. Even beyond his fake promise to drain the swamp, as Ralph Nader pointed out Trump "hijacked the progressive agenda." But now that Trump has revealed his true swamp colors by selling out that agenda with his uniformly plutocratic nominees and corporate giveaways, these voters who now know they were lied to by a con-artist and that they are being consistently ripped-off by Trump policies on issues from his tawdry personal conflicts of interest, taxes and health care to trade and internet privacy should make the same demand about Gorsuch from the Republicans. They would only need to influence 2 or 3 Republican Senators from swing states against abolition of the filibuster in order to make all the difference. Flipping any Republicans would also make the Democrats' betrayal less tenable when they are primaried.
Restoration of democracy should be a non-partisan American principle. Voting for cloture and abolition of the filibuster is the most significant possible way right now for corrupt politicians of both parties to keep filling the Swamp. Such a vote by Democrats would only further the Party's self-destructive free-fall toward oblivion. Any Democratic votes enabling the Gorsuch appointment is evidence that the existence of two plutocratic parties has become as redundant as were two pro-slavery parties in 1854-56. One of them must go in order to clear the way for progress. When they rigged the 2016 nomination against Sanders, the plutocracy Democrats unnecessarily made the general election a toss-up as to which party would be cleared away. Democrats lost the toss. By effectively filibustering Gorsuch they may just have bought a reprieve for their continued existence through to 2018.
Unstrict Construction
Americans generally comprehend the Roberts Court's serial violations of the constitutional separation of powers in its pro-corruption decisions. The Roberts 5's political decisions imposing a corrupt plutocracy on the country by sweeping invalidation of a variety of state and federal anti-corruption laws remain in force under the deadlocked Court. These rulings will either rise -- to inflict even worse damage on the country -- or fall, to rescue the country from plutocracy, depending on whether the Senate approves what Republicans like to call a "strict constructionist" to take Scalia's seat.
The Republicans' contrarian, if not incoherently subjective, definition of "strict construction" is more nearly the opposite of its historic meaning when Nixon started using the term in the 1960s to describe Republican justices. At that time the term invoked justices like Oliver Wendell Holmes, or Felix Frankfurter, who followed venerable constitutional rules -- such as "the doubtful case" rule and the "political question" doctrine -- designed to prevent the Court's exercise of judicial review powers for political purposes. Such justices set the standard for maintaining proper democratic deference to the elected, political branches of government.
Whether or not Nixon and virtually every Republican after him who used this "strict construction" formula to describe their preferred judicial nominees were familiar with the separation of powers rules, these traditional rules defined the intricate boundaries between the narrowly prescribed circumstances for legitimate judicial review of the constitutionality of legislation and the far-too-frequently exercised judicial supremacy over legislative matters, like election and anti-corruption laws, that fall outside the legitimate scope of the constitutional powers assigned to the judicial branch.
It is the legislature that was given the constitutional power (Art. I, Sec. 4&5)) to regulate and judge elections for the purpose of assuring that elections do not deteriorate into instruments of corruption, as they clearly have under the Supreme Court's "money-is-speech" logic.
The traditional separation-of-powers rules provide the only legitimate source for guiding the Court in giving any objective application to the concept of "strict construction." This phrase and its various cognates can only meaningfully refer to strict judicial adherence to the traditional rules that deny the judiciary constitutionally illegitimate political powers to extract new law from vague political principles found in the Constitution that guide political, not legal, matters. Republican appointees like Scalia, Roberts, Alito and their judicial-supremacist predecessors and colleagues have exercised such political powers since 1976 in blatant violation of the separation-of-powers rules. See Keck (2005). The founders considered such violations the straightest path to tyranny.
There is no doubt that Gorsuch will vote to continue the tyranny caused by plutocratic corruption. A true "strict constructionist" like, for example, the former Justice Stevens would not overturn anti-corruption legislation. Stevens supported the limitation that McCain-Feingold placed on corporate independent expenditures, which was overturned by the judicial supremacist Citizens United (2010) majority. He also supported that same law's regulation of the unlimited expenditures on sham corporate-issue ads, which was overturned in the even worse, though lesser known, judicial supremacist FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc. (2007).
Gorsuch is the opposite of a "strict constructionist" because like any other Federalist Society operative he will vote eagerly to overturn any such laws that significantly threaten the rule of plutocracy, by inventing any excuse necessary for that purpose. In plucking constitutional doctrine out of thin air to reach his political goals, Gorsuch will likely prove even more adept than Roberts, the current master on the Court of that evil art.
For over 40 years Republicans have failed to find an accurate replacement for Nixon's "strict-constructionist" concept to invoke the plutocratic politics they want their justices to actively serve in the current era of systemic plutocratic corruption. The term was suited to the Republican status quo strategy of a previous era, when corruption occurred at the individual level rather than system-wide due to Supreme Court rulings. But the term no longer describes their changed criteria for selecting activist right-wing plutocratic justices necessary to maintain the present systemically corrupt plutocracy legalized by the activist Court.
If they practiced truth in labeling, Republicans would describe their new ideological criteria for selecting justices which is enforced by the Federalist Society as "plutocratic judicial supremacy." This includes in one phrase both of the governing ideologies for creating a government on the auction block to plutocrats under the aegis of unchallenged Supreme Court pro-corruption rulings.
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