Albuquerque, NM - Today, Democrats in the U.S. Senate announced that they have the 41 votes necessary to filibuster President Trump's highly-qualified nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Neil Gorsuch. Senator Martin Heinrich is among the Democrats pledging to join the filibuster.

Polling shows that a majority of Americans want Democrats to allow an up-or-down vote on Donald Trump's nominee, and yet Sen. Heinrich's intransigence is forcing Mitch McConnell and Republicans to follow Sen. Harry Reid's footsteps and remove the filibuster as a possibility for all judicial nominees going forward.

"There is no reason but petty politics for Sen. Heinrich and his Democrat colleagues to filibuster a nominee as qualified and forthcoming as Judge Gorsuch," said Republican Party of New Mexico Spokesman Tucker Keene. "The filibuster is a useful and important legislative tool, so long as it is used responsibly and rationally, not purely as a roadblock against any action taken by the majority. If Heinrich is reflexively filibustering Gorsuch just because he was nominated by a Republican president, it is clear that he and his colleagues in the Democrat senate minority are no longer using the filibuster in the manner intended. Heinrich is letting politics cloud his judgement and get in the way of his duties as a Senator."

Gorsuch has been thoroughly vetted, answering nearly 1200 questions during his Senate hearing, more than double the number answered by Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor or Kagan during their hearings. His opinions have also been decidedly mainstream, with only 1.5 percent of his majority opinions being accompanied by a dissent.

"Gorsuch is too qualified, too mainstream, and too well-vetted not to deserve the support of Sen. Heinrich and other Democrats," said Keene. "Heinrich has no excuse but politics to oppose his nomination."