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Democrats are delaying for one week an initial committee vote on Neil Gorsuch, President Trump's nominee to the Supreme Court.

Sen. Chuck GrassleyChuck GrassleyRNC head: Dems acting ‘petty’ to GorsuchDems delay Senate panel vote on Supreme Court nomineeGrassley wants details on firm tied to controversial Trump dossierMORE (R-Iowa), the chairman of the committee, said Democrats had requested that the committee's vote on Gorsuch be punted to next week.

"I understand that the minority would like to hold [him] over," Grassley said during the Judiciary Committee's meeting on Monday.

Under committee rules any one member can request that a nomination be held the first time it appears on the agenda.

 Democrats were widely expected to delay the committee's vote until next week.

The delay means the committee vote will take place on April 3, giving Republicans days to meet their goal of winning Gorsuch's confirmation by the full Senate by the end of that week.

The Senate will then go into a recess.

Monday, accusing the Kentucky Republican of "ramming" Gorsuch through the Senate.

The average length of time between a committee vote and a full Senate vote is 12 days, according to Schumer's office.

Democrats are demanding a 60-vote threshold for Gorsuch's approval, but it is unclear whether the party has enough votes to support a filibuster against Trump's nominee.

“I am not inclined to filibuster, even though I’m not inclined to vote for him," Leahy told a Vermont news outlet.

Roughly 14 senators—largely from the party's progressive wing—have said they expect to oppose Gorsuch's nomination. No Democrats have come out in support of him, but most senators up for reelection in states carried by Trump remain on the fence.

Republicans have suggested they will change the Senate's rules allowing a filibuster for Supreme Court nominees if Democrats block Gorsuch.

The committee held a four-day hearing on Gorsuch's nomination last week, with Trump's nominee appearing before the committee for three days.

Grassley praised Gorsuch's performance calling him "deeply committed" to being impartial.

"Last week we got to see up-close how thoughtful, articulate, and humble he is," he said during Monday's committee meeting.

Democrats remain bitter over Republicans' refusal to give former President Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland, a hearing or a vote.

Sen. Dianne FeinsteinDianne FeinsteinOvernight Regulation: Trump repeals 'blacklisting' ruleDems delay Senate panel vote on Supreme Court nomineeDems get it wrong: 'Originalism' is mainstream, even for liberal judgesMORE (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the committee, read a list of former presidents who had been allowed to fill a vacancy in an election year during Monday's meeting.

"You can imagine perhaps on our side the depth of feeling that came about during this period of time," she said, referring to the fight over Garland.

Feinstein added that the millions pouring in to the fight over Gorsuch from outside groups is "counterproductive."

The same way the Democrats rammed Obamacare down our throats also? It's time Democrats stop whinning.!

Democrats also delayed Rod Rosenstein, nominated to be deputy attorney general, by a week.

By NICHOLAS FANDOSMARCH 19, 2017

UNION, S.C. — As Johnny Sinclair sees it, this declining mill town voted overwhelmingly to send President Trump to the White House for one overriding reason: to change rules of political engagement in Washington that had long left places like this high and dry.

So when Mr. Trump released his first budget last week, proposing to significantly shrink the footprint of federal government while building up the military, Mr. Sinclair saw a politician finally following through.

“We don’t expect Trump to get everything done he said he would. But we expect him to try,” Mr. Sinclair said Friday, as he sat in a restaurant here with four friends. “The roads may not end up paved in gold, but we expect him to be out, shovel in hand.”

In Washington, Mr. Trump’s budget has been met by many with deep, even hostile skepticism. South Carolina’s longtime Republican senior senator, Lindsey Graham, called it “dead on arrival.” Democrats’ denunciations have been even stronger.

But here, in the region that first sent Mr. Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, to Washington six years ago as a congressman, Mr. Sinclair’s conclusion appears to be the more common one, even if opinions differ on which programs need cutting.

“The budget reflects, in my mind, just what he said he was going to do,” said John Day, who lives about an hour away from here in the rapidly growing, decidedly more prosperous suburbs of Charlotte. Republicans and the news media ought to give Mr. Trump a chance, he said, echoing a point Mr. Mulvaney made when he unveiled the budget last week: After all, what did they expect?

The district Mr. Mulvaney represented in Congress, which has lurched rightward in recent decades, is a blend of overwhelmingly conservative suburbs, blue-collar former mill towns like Union where Mr. Trump’s populist appeal was strongest, and military communities scattered around installations at Shaw Air Force Base and nearby Fort Jackson in the region’s southernmost reaches.

Few congressional districts better capture the breadth of the unorthodox coalition that came together to elect Mr. Trump in November than this one. And though they found reasons to differ, Trump voters interviewed across the district since the budget was released Thursday seemed to embrace the document as the president’s clearest declaration yet of how he wants to reshape the federal government.

Here in Union, where thousands lost their jobs when a dozen or so textile mills closed in the 1980s and 1990s, the effects of government spending have often been hard to see. Many blame the North American Free Trade Agreement for the region’s decline, though academics disagree. No matter the cause, the void left behind has never really been filled, save perhaps by a deep suspicion of the federal government’s ability to meaningfully help.

Sitting around a table at Bantam Chef, where they regularly meet, Mr. Sinclair, 72, and his friends can still tick off the names of the shuttered operations. Government assistance that helped is harder to name, even though the city has benefited from a slew of federal grants and social programs over the years.

Mr. Sinclair worked in a mill here before spending three decades at Duke Energy. A former Democratic precinct captain and still a “card-carrying” Democrat, he voted for Mr. Trump like so many here because he was desperate to try something different.

“We haven’t gotten nothing out of the last few presidents,” he said, whether they were Republican or Democrat. Mr. Sinclair said he was not against federal programs to support things like infrastructure and education — but why not shake things up?

Phillip Lemons has watched the decline play out here for almost 20 years through the floor-to-ceiling windows of his jewelry shop on Main Street. His business has trundled along despite a 40 percent decline in sales since the 1990s, but like many here, Mr. Lemons said he had seen enough friends and family struggle to regain their footing after the textile industry collapse not to question whether some benefits on the chopping block might be best left alone.

“I think a person needs to help themselves, but there are people who have done that and you can’t just tell them we’re going to change the law and take them away,” he said.

Like Mr. Sinclair, Mr. Lemons considered Mr. Trump’s straightforward, businesslike approach a badly needed breath of fresh air. His budget, a savvy “opening salvo,” as Mr. Lemons described it, only backs up that initial assessment.

Still, Mr. Lemons had a word of caution for the president, from one businessman to another.

“I’d tell him to remember an average person,” Mr. Lemons said. “That’s something I’ve worried about from the beginning. Being so rich, how is he going to stay in touch with the average person?”

The scene could hardly have been more different in the Charlotte suburbs, where Mr. Day sat drinking a beer with his wife, Malissa, in Baxter Village, a planned community where children in ballet clothes and taekwondo robes bounced along the sidewalks on Thursday afternoon. The development sprouted up over the past two decades as Charlotte and the surrounding area emerged as a global business hub.

“I think the people need to realize that we are $20 trillion in debt, and you can’t keep spending money on programs that have shown no appreciable impact,” said Mr. Day, who goes by Chip.

Other programs, like the Environmental Protection Agency, or funded areas like the arts, public news media and foreign aid, had simply grown beyond appropriate bounds, he said.

“We have so many problems here in America, so many people who legitimately need help, why wouldn’t we try our own first?” he said.

There were specific proposals — likes cuts to medical research and some programs supporting the poor — with which he did not agree, Mr. Day said, conferring with his wife. But to get hung up on them would be to miss the larger story.

“The small stuff will fall out,” Mr. Day said. “It always does.”

Two hours south, where the district’s far corner includes Shaw Air Force Base, home to the 20th Fighter Wing, families affiliated with the base and with nearby Fort Jackson hope the big stuff — a proposed $54 billion bump to the Defense Department’s budget — will not.

As he walked with his wife though a park in Sumter, not far from the base, Harold Gonzales, who flew F-16s for two decades, said he was pleased not only that Mr. Trump had made good on his campaign pledge, but that he had proposed a budget at all after five years when sequestration had determined the armed forces spending.

More money would mean upgraded equipment with new technology, more flight time for pilots at Shaw who badly need it and a better shot at retaining top military talent. Cuts to other federal expenses, he said, would simply need to be swallowed to get American defenses where they need to be to maintain standing vis-à-vis adversaries like Russia and China.

Though that, he conceded, would require more budgeting.

The Democrats are obsessed with Russian conspiracy theories. It seems that only Democrats are allowed to speak with Russia because nobody complained back in 2015 when 30 Senate Democrats met with Russian Diplomats in order to advance Obama’s Iran nuclear deal.

Foreign Policy reports in August of 2015:

The White House says it’s confident it has the votes to override Republicans who reject the historic accord to limit Iran’s nuclear program agreed to by world powers and Tehran. But some of America’s closest allies are less certain, and are clearing their schedules to meet with wavering Democratic lawmakers in a push to keep the deal intact.

Some of Washington’s less reliable partners are worried too: Top diplomats from Russia and China joined a rare meeting of world powers’ envoys on Capitol Hill this week with roughly 30 Senate Democrats to tamp down concerns over the nuclear agreement.

During the meeting, which was confirmed to Foreign Policy by an aide to Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), a number of Democrats expressed genuine confusion about how world powers would react if Congress rejected the deal, and whether a “better deal” could be struck in the future. Surprised by this lack of clarity, the diplomats pushed back on a number of counts.

British Ambassador Peter Westmacott insisted any chances of getting a better deal were “far-fetched,” according to two individuals in the room. He also speculated that international sanctions against Tehran would fall apart even if Congress blocked the deal — a view seconded by Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Read the rest of this article here.

Strange how the Democrats can meet with Russian ambassadors and no one ever accused them of being Russian puppets, yet President Trump and his administration are constantly accused of wild Russian conspiracy theories. The Russian narrative is fake news propped up by the media in order to legitimize President Trump.