Of the president s choice or at least his nominee to head the supreme court, Amy Coney Barrett who had her confirmation hearinglast week and that process resumed this week and to highlight that for us Alexander Bolton of the hill who serves as Senior Reporter for that publication. Thanksfor joining us. Good morning. Walk us throughthe next steps and whats going on behind the scenes as this week starts off . The next steps are on october 22 which is thursday. Theres going to be a vote on barretts nomination. Shes expected to get every single republican vote on the Judiciary Committee and every stdemocrat is expected to vote against her and then Mitch Mcconnell says hes going to take up her nomination on the floor friday, october 23 so what that means is hes going to file cloture on her so the expectation then is there would be a procedural vote on advancing the nomination on the floor, a cloture vote on tuesday. You need an intervening day between when cloture is invoked but when its filed and when its voted on so if mcconnell could speed things up a little bit by keeping the senate in over the weekend but the expectation is that he files for cloture on friday the 23rd and the cloture vote to advance nomination is on tuesday and then theres going to be the final or down vote on wednesday. So then that would open the Democratic Senators 30 hours of closed cloture debate to talk about a nomination and then its in the books. So less than for the democrats involved in this process . Whats the strategy of this week goinginto next . Theres not a whole lot they can do. Brown has locked in the vote for the 22nd. Typically what happens is wh democrats on the committee hold over a nomination for an extra week , but thats not going to happen. Grant has locked in the votes so theres nothing they can do. They can try boycotting the meeting on the 22nd, but that is not, the republicans say theyre just going to rewrite the rules and theres a quorum role in the committee that you need to have minority members present to vote on something. But if the democrats skip to try to deprive the republicans of that quorum it wont make a difference because the republicans will just vote on a new set of rules and thats something that ted cruz and a member of the Judiciary Committee has said hes been in contact with Lindsey Graham, the chairman and theyre going to do whatever it takes to get this nomination moving so democrats have been saying for weeks that there really is no procedural bullet to stop this, the vote is moving forward. This is alex bolton of the hill, you have a story this morning just to change topics a little bit. And it comes to looking at huthe joe biden and Chuck Schumer in the senate and possibly what might happen if the democrats do win not only the white house but the senate, could you talk about this story and its importance . I think one of the big stories coming out of the barretts confirmation hearings is we had two groups in particular, this person calling for Diane Feinstein to step down as the top democrat of the Judiciary Committee and its a preview of i think the headaches that biden and schumer are going to face if they do win big on election day as is expected. If democrats take back the senate, if biden is president there are big expectations and the fact that you have brooks gunning for Diane Feinstein at the end of Amy Coney Barretts hearing she praises his leadership and saying these are some ofthe best hearings shes ever been a part of. I guess this is what 20 years ago or 25 years ago would have been a not so remarkable display of bipartisanship at least trying to mend some fences on the committee thats been wracked by acrimony going back to kavanaugh and before. After she did that you had groups calling for her head and it goes to show that liberals, democratic activists, groups on the left and some of these junior firebrands in the caucus, theyre not even in any mood to conciliate with the republicans. Theyre in a mood to get things done and they want bold change so it goes to show that there is pressure on schumer right off the back to move ahead with filibuster reform, theres pressure to move with bold change, theres going to be pressure for medicare expansion, pressure for maybe not medicare, that might be too ambitious but things the public option or for repealing trumps tax cuts, the 20 17th tax cuts and job act,revealed that right away. There hasnt been a whole lot of talk about what the whgoverning strategy is going to be for democrats. They only talk so much about their agenda recently, its been the focus has mainly been on trump and i think this shows that there is some tension right now between the kind of anthe establishment and activistgroups. If you want to follow them by doing something as minor as going on Lindsey Graham theyre going to call on you to step down as next chairman its a really tough call for schumer. Its one thing when the first us group that came out calling for Diane Feinsteindemanding justice which is this group approached to trumps nominees and its a relatively new group. When you have this person, this major group and kind of the Democratic Coalition stepping up to call for his resin resignation that becomes verytough. So i think even if democrats win back the white house and senate, its not going to be peachy keen. Theres going to be a lot of internal divisions and arguments that we havent even begun to see and we are starting to now with the turmoil over feinstein