There's been a lot of stirring on the Neil Gorsuch front. More and more Democratic senators seem disinclined to allow the Senate to give his nomination a vote. Chuck Schumer seems immovable on the subject. (The same cannot be said, alas, for Claire McCaskill, who seems distressingly ambivalent on the topic. My guess? She goes over the side.) Meanwhile, the Republicans are unsure whether or not they want to blow up the filibuster to install Gorsuch on the Supreme Court. (My guess? Boom!) A lot of this ambivalence, I believe, is rooted in their vestigial conscience as a party.

They know what they did to Merrick Garland. They know why they did it to Merrick Garland. At some level, they know how ridiculous their whining about how roughly Gorsuch has been treated sounds to anyone with a short-term memory that extends back to 2015. The longer this stretches out, the more time their vestigial conscience has to work on them.

At the same time, Schumer's argument that a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court should not be doled out by a president who is under FBI investigation is beginning to bite just a little. People are getting a little antsy about the amount of dark money pushing Gorsuch's case. And Gorsuch did himself no favors by trying to bury the Senate Judiciary Committee under an avalanche of smug non-answers. (Dark money? What's that? Is that trying to find the pants in which you left your wallet?) There's more going on here than there was a month ago.

So the job of bucking up the Senate majority is left to its good friends outside the caucus room. For example, the National Rifle Association has stepped up bigly. It's in for a million bucks, which, of course, will not cause Gorsuch to sacrifice his ability to judge a gun control case fairly. You can also tell how nervous Gorsuch's supporters have become because, once again, we are seeing the Keep The Powder Dry argument floating through the discourse.

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This is the political strategy by which Democrats give the Republicans what they want on the assumption that they will be able to assert their power at some vague point in the future. The only minor flaw in this plan is that it never works. The Democratic Party must have an airplane hangar somewhere filled to the rafters with dry powder. Nonetheless, the idea is back again. Here's some superb concern-trolling from a former Republican flack, brought to us by Tiger Beat On The Potomac:

The problem for Schumer and his caucus is this: Republicans are not bluffing when they say Gorsuch will be on the court one way or another. The squishes, the institutionalists, even the erstwhile "Gang" members are unwavering in their support. Gorsuch is well-qualified for the job, acquitted himself admirably by any measure, and if an unprecedented partisan filibuster is the only thing standing between him and the bench, the Reid Rule will be invoked for the second time.

Here it comes…

But saying Republicans have the political will to put Gorsuch on the court is different than saying there are 50 GOP senators who are otherwise prepared to end the filibuster. Their appetite is entirely a function of circumstance. Were Democrats to lay off Gorsuch, keeping their powder dry for the future and maintaining the moral high ground, it would be rather easy to imagine the Susan Collinses, John McCains and Lindsey Grahams of the world getting cold feet with a lesser Trump pick, particularly one who shifts the balance of the court rather than maintaining it. Which is to say that Gorsuch's nomination is something of a perfect storm for GOP procedural fortitude. Only seeing such a model jurist held hostage to cynical political whims would be enough to compel the righteous indignation necessary to go nuclear.

And then comes the point where the author shoots his own argument through the head, and gives anyone with that aforementioned short-term memory a chance to tell the author to piss off.

(I'll pause here so my friends on the left can let out a primal scream for poor Merrick Garland.)

Piss off.

What happened to Garland—who couldn't even get a private meeting with a single Republican senator—changed the political context irreparably. Because of that, you can't just tell the Democrats that it's to their advantage to wave off what was done to Garland, much less to roll over for Gorsuch, without sounding naïve or ignorant. History tells us that the fight for which the Democrats "keep the powder dry" never occurs. Recent history tells us that there is no compelling political reason to put Neil Gorsuch on the court ahead of Merrick Garland. If the Republicans want to blow up the filibuster to do it, they should suck it up and take the political risks that doing so entails.

History tells us that the fight for which the Democrats "keep the powder dry" never occurs.

(I'm not entirely sure that those risks are that great, at least in terms of getting Republican senators re-elected.)

But one thing that makes me feel good about the building resistance to Gorsuch is that the Democrats in Congress seem at last to be bridling at the notion that "bipartisanship" is primarily the responsibility of their party, that they don't necessarily have to be the grown-ups in a room where childish vandals roam free, and that, sooner or later, the Republicans have to take responsibility in real time for the damage they do. Chuck Schumer is under no obligation to salve the consciences of the people who stiffed Merrick Garland—and, by the way, there is no requirement that the Supreme Court be "balanced" ideologically—by giving them exactly the result they wanted a year ago.

Touch off the powder for a change.

UPDATE -- Of course, as is often the case among Democratic senators, the usual suspects are rounding up themselves.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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