Requiring 60 votes in the Senate to confirm Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court is not a filibuster, Bernie Sanders argued Sunday ahead of a Democratic effort to block President Trump's nominee to the high court.

"It's not a question of filibustering," Sanders said on CNN's State of the Union. "The rules right now, for good reasons, are 60 votes."

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said this past week that Democrats would filibuster Gorsuch, requiring 60 votes for him to advance.

But Sanders, an independent from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats, said that the 60-vote threshold is not a filibuster.

"There will be a vote," Sanders said. "If he doesn't get 60 votes, he does not become Supreme Court justice."

"It's not like people are going to be there standing for months and months bringing down the government," he said of a filibuster.

In fact, the vote that Sanders referred to, which requires 60 votes in Senate rules, is not a vote on confirmation but rather a vote to limit debate, which wouldn't be necessary if Democrats didn't threaten to filibuster. In the past, when Republicans were in the minority, Sanders has called requiring that 60-vote threshold a filibuster, even if no actual talking filibuster took place.

Sanders is now insisting on a "different definition" of a filibuster now that his party is in the minority, a spokesman for Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told the Washington Examiner. The spokesman noted that past Supreme Court nominees have cleared the Senate without 60 votes because the minority party did not insist on 60 votes. Clarence Thomas, for example, was confirmed in 1991 with only 52 votes.

With only 52 members in their caucus, Republicans cannot confirm Gorsuch without Democratic help under current rules.

McConnell, however, has not ruled out the possibility of changing the rules to eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees.