In an interesting piece over at The Daily Beast, Julian Zelizer posits that Gorsuch,

I got nothing clever for this one. Sorry.

Neil Gorsuch

while eminently qualified to sit on the nation’s highest court, be Borked out of spite.

He begins with a fair amount of logic when he says:

“Given Gorsuch’s stellar professional record, his competence does not seem to be in question. At least from the leaked remarks about his meeting with Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, he appears to have a healthy unease with President Trump’s aggressive statements about the judiciary.”

Fair enough, you say?  Well, his hysteria just couldn’t be contained anymore a couple paragraphs later.  He begins to bemoan that Trump didn’t send a “consensus pick” and that since he “lost the popular election by large numbers,” he should have nominated someone that Democrats would want to vote for rather than the right.  Now, I’m sure that he might have a different view of what a “consensus pick is”, but I’d reckon that a voice vote that was essentially unanimous in 2006 with a dozen current Democrat Senators as well as the recent President, Vice President, and the last two Democrat-appointed Secretaries of State on the record as supporting comes pretty close to it.

I hereby solemnly swear that I'm about to get grilled

Robert Bork

So he wants Gorsuch to get “Borked”.  He’s too conservative and its simply not fair that the Senate chose to abide by the Biden Rule, proposed in a fit in 1992 by then-Senator and recent Vice President Joe Biden in an effort to undermine the possibility of George HW Bush filling a vacancy on the Supreme Court that never materialized.  It’s just not fair that one of the Justices furthest to the right be replaced by someone relatively far to the right when Obama would have put someone left of center on the bench.

Perhaps the Senate didn’t do their job last year.  Perhaps Biden should have kept his mouth shut in 1992 and this never would have happened.  And perhaps Democrats mailed it in in 2006.  I won’t try to answer those questions here.  But I have a hard time respecting someone that would call for an eminently-qualified jurist to be kept off the highest court in the land merely out of spite.  It undermines the presidential prerogative to nominate judges to federal judgeships that has served us well for over 200 years.