The top Democrat in the US Senate vowed today that his party will block a confirmation vote on President Donald Trump's nominee to fill a vacant Supreme Court seat.
The Republican-controlled upper chamber of Congress is scheduled to vote in early April on the nomination of judge Neil Gorsuch, who on Thursday was undergoing his fourth and last day of confirmation hearings in the Senate.
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said Democrats will use a filibuster - a parliamentary stalling procedure - to prevent Republicans from bringing Gorsuch's nomination to a final vote.
"After careful deliberation, I have concluded that I cannot support judge Neil Gorsuch's nomination to the Supreme Court," Schumer said.
"My vote will be no, and I urge my colleagues to do the same," he said on the Senate floor.
Sixty votes are needed to end debate on the Gorsuch nomination in the 100-seat Senate before a final vote on his nomination.
Republicans have 52 seats so Gorsuch will need the support of at least eight Democrats.
Conservative backers of Gorsuch have spent millions in recent months in campaigns to exert pressure on 10 Democratic senators facing re-election in 2018 in states that Trump won in the presidential election last November.
Gorsuch "was unable to sufficiently convince me that he'd be an independent check" on Trump, Schumer said.
He said the judge is "not a neutral legal mind but someone with a deep-seated conservative ideology."
However, Republicans in the Senate have a so-called "nuclear option" of changing the Senate's rules so that the threshold for approving Supreme Court nominees would be not 60 votes but rather a simple majority.
Trump has urged the Republicans to resort to this strategy if necessary.
But the issue is delicate: it opens up the possibility of Democrats, if they recover control of the Senate at some point in the future, also being able to confirm a Supreme Court nominee with a simple majority vote.
Democrats are still furious with how Senate Republicans last year refused to even grant a meeting -- much less hearings or a vote -- to Merrick Garland, then-president Barack Obama's nominee to fill the seat left vacant by the death last year of Justice Antonin Scalia.
The White House complained about Schumer's comment on Gorsuch.
"We find Senator Schumer's announcement truly disappointing because it breaks with the tradition of how the Senate has handled Supreme Court confirmation votes in modern times and represents the type of partisanship that Americans have grown tired of," White House spokesman Sean Spicer said.
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