Mitch McConnell's nuclear trigger finger

In the 1944 noir film "Gaslight," a villain hides his crimes by convincing his innocent wife she's insane, feeding her barely perceptible lies and altering small aspects of her environment until she doubts her own instincts and observations.

Senate Republicans are attempting the same scheme on their Democratic counterparts, trying to convince them and the rest of the world that if Republicans invoke what's known as the nuclear option to confirm Judge Neil Gorsuch as a Supreme Court justice, it would be the Democrats who were responsible - not the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, the man who would pull the trigger.

No one should fall for Republicans' trickery. Democrats are right to embrace their principled opposition to Judge Gorsuch and remember that however Mr. McConnell chooses to respond, it will be his decision alone.

Going nuclear, or changing Senate rules to make a Supreme Court confirmation possible with a simple majority, would be a hugely disproportionate response to reasonable Democratic opposition and will expose Mr. McConnell's much-ballyhooed "institutionalism" as the fraud it has always been.

Democrats have come by their opposition to Judge Gorsuch honestly. In private conversations and meetings with progressive groups, many senators who knew that Judge Gorsuch would rule in a way they wouldn't like on every major issue they care about nevertheless made it clear that they entered the judiciary committee hearings willing to be persuaded to support him, or at least not stand in his way.

That openness caused a great deal of frustration among progressives, who pressed Democrats for more forceful opposition. But Democratic senators made clear that they wanted to give Judge Gorsuch the fair hearing that Republicans had denied Judge Merrick Garland.

Instead of seizing this opportunity in his confirmation hearings, Judge Gorsuch alienated one Democratic senator after another with his smug and evasive demeanor. He took his strategy of avoiding missteps to the extreme and neglected to provide senators with the substantive answers they deserve.

The result, according to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, was "an almost seismic shift in the caucus" against Judge Gorsuch. Also of note: The week of Judge Gorsuch's hearings began with the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, testifying that President Trump's campaign was under investigation for possibly colluding with a hostile foreign power.
Democrats saw a nominee whose ideology is, by some accounts, farther to the right than Justice Antonin Scalia's, nominated for a lifetime appointment on the nation's highest court by a president whose White House is ensnared in an F.B.I. investigation. Those are not exactly circumstances conducive to bipartisan cooperation.

Rather than accept Democrats' opposition as legitimate, Senator McConnell is dead set on escalation. The view among veteran McConnell watchers is he has already decided to go nuclear. For a man who chooses his words carefully, Mr. McConnell's saying that Judge Gorsuch will be "confirmed on Friday" is tantamount to saying that he intends to go nuclear if Democrats block the confirmation on the floor.

If Senator McConnell decides to immediately reach for the nuclear option, that will be rash for two main reasons. First, when Democrats eliminated filibusters for most presidential nominations - going nuclear themselves - in 2013, they did so in the face of obstruction on a far greater scale than anything Mr. McConnell has faced as majority leader. By the time Democrats exercised the nuclear option, Senator McConnell had unleashed nearly 500 filibusters and spent years twisting Republicans' arms to prevent them from working with Democrats, regardless of the substance of a given issue, in pursuit of his goal of denying President Obama a second term.

In one revealing interview, Mr. McConnell explained that he persuaded moderate Republicans who were inclined to work with Democrats on the Affordable Care Act into opposition because "if the proponents of the bill were able to say it was bipartisan, it tended to convey to the public that this is O.K., they must have figured it out." Senator McConnell's insight was that even if the substance of a given bill was bipartisan, the bill would be labeled partisan as long as he enforced a party-line vote. And he was right.

Second, even after Republican obstruction had become a sad fact of Senate life, Senator Harry Reid tried for years to avert the nuclear option. He worked with Republicans such as Lamar Alexander of Tennessee to devise numerous "gentlemen's agreements" to make the Senate work more efficiently. When those efforts failed, the nuclear option was a last resort. Even though the word "institutionalist" is frequently uttered in the same breath as Senator McConnell's name, nothing could be further from the truth. No institutionalist would abide so many filibusters or deny a qualified nominee like Judge Garland a hearing.

The majority leader has made no real effort to avert the nuclear option. To the contrary, he appears to be itching to pull the trigger - and in his insidious way, he wants to convince Democrats that it'll be their fault when he does. Democrats must refuse to be gaslit. They should stand by their principles and stand firm in their opposition to Judge Gorsuch.

If Senator McConnell blows up Senate rules to jam through President Trump's nominee, he will be exposed as the radical that he truly is. The writer, a former deputy chief of staff to Senator Harry Reid, is the senior strategic adviser at the Center for American Progress Action Fund