Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told Newsmax TV on Thursday that he invoked the "nuclear option" to confirm Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch last week because "Democrats had a hard time figuring out how to oppose him."
"The biggest decision I made was not allow President [Barack] Obama to fill a vacancy on the way out the door," the Kentucky Republican said in an exclusive interview. "In other words, the decision was who ought to fill this vacancy that occurred in a presidential election year.
"I convinced my colleagues that that ought to be whoever we were electing last year," he continued. "So, Donald Trump got to make this selection instead of Barack Obama.
"That's a huge difference in terms of the kind of person we anticipated getting on the court.
"President Trump didn't disappoint. He picked the best circuit judge in America, Neil Gorsuch.
"Democrats had a hard time figuring out how to oppose him," McConnell said.
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He noted that Democrats were still smarting over McConnell's decision last year to not hold any hearings on Obama's nominee, appellate court Chief Judge Merrick Garland, and retaliated by filibustering Gorsuch.
"They were still talking about Garland," he told Newsmax. "That was last year. They were talking about Trump.
"That wasn't the nominee. Gorsuch was the nominee.
"In the end, they knuckled down and tried to defeat him by filibustering — and we decided that we would not let that stand, and he was confirmed," McConnell said.
Under the nuclear option, Gorsuch could be confirmed by a simple majority vote of the Senate, versus the 60-vote threshold required under existing rules — and Republicans would have needed six Democrats to break ranks.
Gorsuch was confirmed, 54-45, last Friday and was sworn in on Monday to fill the vacancy created by the death of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016.
"He's going to be a great Supreme Court justice for many decades to come," McConnell told Newsmax.