two other judges are currently under consideration, william pryor from alabama, thomas hardiman, whon pennsylvania. it is george neil gorsuch who seems to have the inside track. joining us now from florida, brit hume. first of all, can the democrats block president trump's choice? >> yeah, they can, bill. if they filibuster it, the republicans don't have 60 votes, which is what you need to shut on a filibuster. they only have 53. if a filibuster were mounted, it wouldn't halt the consideration of the nomination until it ended. it could be ended if the republicans were able to round up seven democrats to vote with them. they could shut it down. only once before in history has a supreme court nomination ever been filibustered and that was the nomination, the last republican supreme court nomination, out of samuel alito, that filibuster failed. he was confirmed. >> bill: it looks to me that it will be very hard for the trumpet administration to get seven democratic senators, two or three, i can see, seven, the it will be tremendous pressure on those people to stay within the party. >> t

judges william pryor and hardeman know better. >> that is laura ingraham being what she is.t's just a right-wing talk radio host. sadly, she is too much support among too many republican members of congress and those are that are more concerned with republican talking points. >> martha: she is merely expressing her opinion. in her mind, she is saying that she thinks this is problematic for him as the nominee. that is what i'm asking you to comment on. >> quite frankly, martha, it is to his credit that he defended the integrity of the judiciary. >> martha: it may work well with him in the confirmation hearing. >> martha, that's not going to be enough. the bigger issue is that president trump has pursued this strategy of insulting judges that disagree with him, attacking justices with such vile language, the speaker of the house paul ryan says his language was a textbook definition of racism. the sad aspect of it is, to paraphrase donald trump, even a bad high school student would know the separation of powers in a system of checks and balances in our country. at the end of th

the confirmability issue comes in between him and, say, william pryor, a federal appeals court judge from alabama, who was considered. had some more difficult to explain to members of the senate from the democratic party, his views on abortion. one of the worst decisions ever in supreme court history. so you look at all those factors. his confirmability was definitely an issue. >> pete, when you look at, if he is to go through the confirmation process and end up installed on the court is he going to have an impact or is is he coming in too late? >> you cannot vote on cases that were argued before you got there. you must be present to win at the supreme court. so he'll probably -- if the normal rules follow, the typical -- if you look at that confirmation time for the current members of the court, it averages about 11 weeks. that would put him on -- some time in mid-april, the last two weeks of argument in the supreme court term are the last two weeks in april. so there's, what, six -- 12 cases maybe, a dozen or so. so he would get involved in some of the more controversial cases of t