Democrats hope the political pressure — and fear of being lumped in with Trump — will be enough to break the GOP’s Supreme Court blockade. | Getty Dems: Trump may get us a SCOTUS win

Donald Trump may be President Barack Obama’s best hope of getting a justice on the Supreme Court.

With the billionaire developer steaming toward the GOP presidential nomination, Democrats are planning a new offensive linking Trump to the Senate GOP’s refusal to move on a court nominee.


Both phenomena are similar kinds of extremism, Democrats say, arguing that Senate Republicans now have to prove they can govern by moving forward on a new justice — and distancing themselves from the Trump chaos.

Just hours after Trump’s Super Tuesday romp, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid made the connection as he laid into the Supreme Court situation as the latest example of obstructionism from the other side: “From this rhetoric to their actions, Republicans have set the Trump standard. … Donald Trump is the ultimate fulfillment of the Republican Party’s legacy of obstruction and resentment,” he said on the floor on Wednesday morning.

At the same time, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has begun circulating material to reporters in Ohio, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina and Missouri, pressing the connection between Trump and the Supreme Court fight. That will be followed by an orchestrated chorus of elected officials, campaigns and state parties making the case in local media, and in paid advertisements such as the Web video out Monday from Democratic Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, who is running for the U.S. Senate, blasting her opponent, incumbent Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

“Sen. Rob Portman Wants Donald Trump to Appoint the Next Supreme Court Justice,” reads an Ohio news release from the DSCC, which will be cut and pasted for campaigns to use in other tight races.

Democrats hope the political pressure — and fear of being lumped in with Trump — will be enough to break the GOP’s Supreme Court blockade. It’s a tall order, though: Republicans, led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have been unwavering in their position that the court vacancy must be filled after the election — and not by Obama. Picking off the 14 GOP votes Democrats need to break any filibuster will be incredibly difficult, given that Republicans fear an Obama pick could tilt the court in a more liberal direction for decades to come. McConnell’s strategy seems aimed at preserving the Senate GOP’s legacy, not the near-term political fight.

McConnell spokesman Don Stewart said the Trump ploy is simply the Democrats’ latest flaky theory for how they’re going to crack McConnell’s strategy, which the majority leader put in place just hours after news broke of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death.

“The leader has made very clear from the very beginning that the principle is here is that the next president will make this nomination, period,” Stewart said.

For Democrats, that’s where Trump comes in. They’ll lean especially hard on senators up for reelection this year, including the five seen as the most vulnerable, but also on McConnell and the rest of the Republican Conference, trying to frame the battle as a choice between signing onto Trump’s agenda and proving that they’re different kinds of Republicans by fulfilling their basic governance duties and confirming a nominee.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told reporters on Tuesday that the “fault lines” inside Republican Party — hard-line conservatives versus more moderate, mainstream lawmakers — are being exposed by Trump’s ascent. And the fallout from that tectonic shift may play out everywhere, including the Supreme Court fight, Schumer believes.

“They’re in disarray. The hard right has pulled them in a direction that is not where the American people are. All the fracture lines that they could sort of paper over in the past, they can’t paper over now,” Schumer said. “McConnell tried to get away from them [hard-line conservatives] in December [with a budget deal]. The presidential election, the Supreme Court vacancy, just pulled them right back there.”

“There’re a lot of cracks that have become deep, deep fissures” because of Trump, Schumer added.

Katie McGinty, running in Pennsylvania against Sen. Pat Toomey, one of the five vulnerable GOP incumbents, said she’s eager to make the connection.

“With the Supreme Court vacancy already weighing on Toomey’s reelection prospects, Donald Trump as the Republican nominee will be a further drag on Toomey,” McGinty said.

They won’t be alone. From the White House on down, it’s an argument Democrats are eager to make.

“There’s no question that if Trump is at the top of the ticket, the Senate Republicans are facing a governing test,” said a senior Democrat familiar with the thinking. “Confirming a nominee would be the best way to show they’re not like Trump.”

Trump’s strong showing on Tuesday plays to their advantage, Democrats say. With so many delegates stacked up, he won’t be out of the race anytime soon. And the longer he stays in, the more likely it is he’ll make more controversial comments.

In the meantime, Obama will put forward a name, and Democrats will have a tangible nominee to rally around — they’re already talking about public relations ploys like mock Senate hearings to highlight the GOP’s refusal to even have courtesy meetings with any Obama pick.

“The only issue likely to break through in the Senate this year is the Supreme Court fight, so if Republicans want to create daylight between themselves and Trump, confirming a qualified nominee is the way to do it,” said Adam Jentleson, a deputy chief of staff to Reid.

Republicans aren’t impressed. Speaking to reporters Tuesday afternoon back at the Capitol after a meeting in the Oval Office with Reid and top Judiciary Committee members Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), McConnell said his position hadn’t changed: “This vacancy will not be filled this year.”

However, that raises the possibility that the vacancy could be filled by Trump, if he wins the election, a fact that Democrats have been playing up in recent days — and one they hope will worry some Republicans.

“They think they are going to wait and see what President Trump will do, I guess, as far as the nomination is concerned,” Reid said.

Democrats say that leaves McConnell stuck between several bad options: confirming the pick that an already centrist-minded Obama makes in his final year, gambling on whomever a first-term President Hillary Clinton or President Bernie Sanders would pick with potentially more Democrats in the Senate, or crossing their fingers that a President Trump would go with a conventional conservative.

Just confirming Obama’s choice, Democrats say, might be the least bad option for McConnell and get the issue out of the way before Democrats have a chance to make the standoff a major campaign issue in the fall.

So far, Republicans remain unmoved.

McConnell has approached the vacancy as an existential issue for conservatives and for his leadership in the Senate because any Democratic pick would likely lose the Supreme Court for the right wing for at least a generation. There will be no backing down, whatever political attacks or speculative scenarios the Democrats try to float.

“If the Democrats would just listen to what the man actually says, they’d know all those theorems are hokum,” Stewart said of McConnell.

But Democrats are still being careful about how they approach the fight, with the White House trying to keep the debate centered entirely on its argument that it is following regular order while the Republicans talk politics. Even Kirkpatrick, whose campaign has hit McCain hard for his statement that he will support the eventual GOP nominee, even if it’s Trump, repeated in an interview Tuesday that despite the primary results, confirming a justice “shouldn’t be a matter of politics. It really is a matter of the Constitution.”

The Arizona Democratic Party is handing the political angle for her, circulating a video clip in which McCain is asked at an Arizona State University forum last month why he’d be comfortable giving Trump the choice.

“Because I think that if it were Donald Trump who were elected president,” McCain said, “he would have the endorsement of the voters of America.”

John Bresnahan contributed to this report.

