Nuclear Autumn?
Leave Alito on for Me

Salon's War Room mulls over options over SCOTUS nominee Samuel Alito:

Even if Democrats unite in opposition to Alito -- and there's no guarantee that they will -- they can't defeat his nomination on an up-or-down vote by themselves. There are 44 Democrats in the Senate; even if they were to pick up the vote of independent Jim Jeffords, they would be six votes shy of what they'd need to defeat Alito. (In the case of a 50-50 tie, Vice President Dick Cheney would cast the decisive 51st vote for Alito.) Can Democrats persuade six Republicans to join them in voting against Alito on the Senate floor? We wouldn't count on it. The nomination is only a day old, but we haven't heard even a single Republican hint that he or she is considering a "no" vote.

Can Democrats filibuster the nomination? Sure they can. The Republicans led a filibuster against Abe Fortas' Supreme Court nomination three and a half decades ago, and the Democrats are free to do the same to Alito's nomination now. It takes 40 votes to keep a filibuster alive. Even if a handful of Red State Democrats go south on them, the Democrats could keep Alito's nomination from reaching the floor of the Senate.

But will they? And would it really work if they do? We don't know the answer to the first question, but we've got a pretty good sense of the answer to the second. If Democrats dare to filibuster the Alito nomination, Republicans will try, once again, to invoke the nuclear option, the complicated parliamentary maneuver by which GOP senators, likely with the help of Cheney, would change the Senate's rule so that filibusters of judicial nominees could be cut off not by the 60-vote supermajority now required for cloture votes but rather by a simple 51-vote majority.
[...]
One way or another, our money says that Alito gets confirmed unless the confirmation process reveals some shocking skeletons in his closet. If we're right, the question for the Democrats is this: How hard to do you fight if you know that you're going to lose anyway? Do you devote your time, your energy and a reputation to this battle, or do you focus instead on GOP scandals that keep coming and a war that won't go away?