This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Vice-President Mike Pence pledged on Saturday that supreme court nominee Neil Gorsuch will join the nation’s highest court “one way or the other”.

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Pence made the pledge during a speech in Philadelphia to the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group. His remarks echoed comments in which Donald Trump urged Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell to “go nuclear” and scrap longstanding rules requiring 60 votes if Democrats move to block Gorsuch.

A least one Democratic senator has vowed to try to block Gorsuch’s nomination as retaliation for McConnell’s decision to block any nominee put forward by Barack Obama, for months, until after the 8 November election. For more than 300 days, the opening created by the February 2016 death of justice Antonin Scalia has remained vacant.

The Senate held no hearings or votes on Merrick Garland, the supreme court candidate that Obama put forward.

On Tuesday, Trump announced Gorsuch, 49, and a judge on the Denver-based 10th US circuit court of appeals, as his choice to succeed the conservative Scalia.

Pence said Gorsuch had already met 12 senators from both parties and was willing to meet with all 100 senators. The vice-president said a candidate to become an associate justice on the nation’s highest court had never faced a successful filibuster.

“Judge Neil Gorsuch should not be the first,” he said.

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“Rest assured, we will work with the Senate leadership to ensure that Judge Gorsuch gets an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor – one way or the other,” Pence said.

“This seat does not belong to any party or any ideology or any interest group. This seat on the supreme court belongs to the American people, and the American people deserve a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.”

Pence said the Senate had voted unanimously to confirm Gorsuch to his current post, and that nearly a third of the senators who voted then are still serving as senators.

The Senate’s vote on Gorsuch in 2006 was by unanimous consent, or voice vote. It was not a recorded vote.