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Editorial: The process is the threat to the Supreme Court, not Gorsuch

The swearing-in of Neil Gorsuch Monday as the newest member of the United States Supreme Court completes the evolution of a process ostensibly designed to ensure impartial constitutional review into one of all-but-undisguised political partisanship. We are left now to hope that Justice Gorsuch will demonstrate from the bench the independent judgment in interpreting the Constitution that our nation's founders forged into the three-way system of checks and balances underpinning our republic.

Critics of specific Supreme Court nominees are quick to warn that the Constitution invests that person with a lifetime appointment all but impossible to revoke. But that investment is not just something to fear; it also can help ensure that the individuals applying a check on the presidential and legislative bodies would be free of political pressure. That measure of reassurance was markedly eroded in the process leading to Gorsuch's confirmation - a process born of political partisanship and steeped in it from beginning to end.

It began with the Senate's stubborn refusal to consider Merrick Garland, Barack Obama's nominee for the seat Gorsuch now holds. Both Garland and Gorsuch had broad respect across political lines for their judgment and judicial stature. Neither, it seems, was about to be confirmed on that basis, however, but on the basis of who appointed them.

Republican Senate President Mitch McConnell set in motion the wheels leading to Friday's distressing rules change when he held up the Garland nomination for nearly a year. Then, with the complicity of intransigent Democrats - including Illinois' own Richard Durbin and Tammy Duckworth - who reflexively lined up against Garland knowing the result, the Senate approved a rules change permitting Gorsuch to be confirmed by a simple majority instead of a three-fifths vote.

Previously, that three-fifths requirement helped assure that a committed minority could hold up an unacceptable nominee being forced on them by an indifferent majority. It helped produce candidates like Garland and Gorsuch who, whatever their primary base, had broad appeal. Now, the indifferent majority holds the reins, and henceforth, instead of thoughtfulness, moderation and compromise, the nation's most powerful justices will be selected on the basis of partisan preference.

A process intended to thwart political ambitions has been reshaped to assure them.

Throughout history, the political tilt of the Supreme Court may have been apparent, but its reliability was never certain. Most recently, Chief Justice John Roberts surprised - and outraged - conservatives when he led a court majority that saved the Affordable Care Act. With future justices likely to be ever more politically focused, one can't help wondering whether the Gorsuch-Garland affair hasn't shaped the tool of a lifetime appointment dangerously toward the reaction of "fear" rather than of "reassurance."

On that score, Republicans and Democrats will no doubt blame each other endlessly, but the truth is that both parties should be ashamed of fostering a process that put political identity ahead of judicial integrity and national interest.

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