Amid White House coronavirus outbreak, here’s where Trump’s Supreme Court nomination stands

Here’s the latest on where the high-profile nomination stands:

On Tuesday, Trump said he wants Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to focus “full time on approving my outstanding nominee to the United States Supreme Court,” as he seemed to cut off negotiations on a new coronavirus relief package via Twitter.

McConnell had previously announced plans to shut down the Senate to legislative action for two weeks through Oct. 19 in a bid to stop the spread of the virus.

Confirmation hearings for Barrett will start next week, as scheduled. “Chairman Graham has all the tools to conduct a hybrid hearing, just like the 150 others the Senate has held this year,” McConnell tweeted. “We will not stop working for the American people because Democrats are afraid they may lose a vote.”

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has scheduled the hearings to begin Oct. 12 at 9 a.m. Members of the panel, which has 12 Republican members and 10 Democrats, have the option to appear in person or remotely.

Committee staff say they are working with various Senate officials, including the office of the Attending Physician, to ensure the hearing is conducted safely. Precautions will include sanitary stations and strict limits on how many people can be in the hearing room.

The timeline thus remains unaltered, despite two GOP members of the committee having tested positive for COVID-19: Mike Lee of Utah and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who both reported their diagnoses on Friday. Two others — Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Ted Cruz of Texas — are reportedly quarantining due to potential exposure, but have tested negative.

Tillis said on “Fox and Friends” Tuesday morning that he is feeling “great” and is “symptom-free,” and that he expected to be cleared to return to the Senate in time to vote in person in committee on Barrett’s nomination.

If all proceeds as planned, the committee could vote on Barrett’s nomination as soon as Oct. 22, though experts in Senate procedure said most likely it would get pushed back a week.

Prominent Democrats are protesting with renewed fervor the GOP plan to move forward with the nomination, roundly castigating the the other party for its irresponsible handling of the virus. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called McConnell and Graham’s decision to move forward despite the Republicans testing positive “reckless and dangerous,” posing risks to the health and safety of senators, staff, and other workers on Capitol Hill. He has demanded that Graham require all Judiciary Committee members to be tested before coming to the hearing.

He and other Democrats have also argued that a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court is too important an issue to deal with over a video conference, though Senate committees have held numerous hearings via Zoom and the like throughout the pandemic.

On Tuesday, Senator Elizabeth Warren, linking to a story about Tillis vowing to be back in the Senate soon, declared that “too many people have already been exposed to COVID-19 from the GOP outbreak.” She said that every senator who tests positive for the virus must follow CDC guidelines, including showing two negative tests “before getting on a plane, returning to the Capitol, & putting more people at risk.”

The key opportunity for Democrats will be when the committee votes on the nomination. The Judiciary Committee’s rules require a majority of members to be physically present in order to vote to send Barrett’s nomination to the full Senate. That most likely means all 12 Republican members of the panel would need to be healthy enough to appear in person, presuming the 10 Democratic members refuse to show up to deny Republicans the quorum they need.

That means if Lee or Tillis aren’t recovered by the time of the vote, or other Republican members fall ill, it could block the committee vote — at least in theory.

However, Republicans can always break the rules, as they’ve done a few times in the recent past, said Jim Manley, a longtime aide for former Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid.

“There’s no reason to expect that Republicans are going to abide by their own rules this time around if given a chance,” said Manley. “I expect them to break all the rules to get it to the floor.”

Still, any moves to do so present some procedural obstacles that Democrats can use to at least slow down the nomination further, threatening McConnell’s pre-election timeline.

McConnell’s timeline has the full Senate set to vote sometime the week of Oct. 26, depending on procedural details.

He has a very slim margin, with Republicans holding a 53-47 majority on the floor, with all members present and voting. Two of those Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, have both indicated they would not vote for Barrett before the election. Collins has said explicitly that “the decision on a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court should be made by the President who is elected” in November. Murkowski has said that she does “not support taking up a potential Supreme Court vacancy this close to an election.”

If both vote no, that means McConnell can only afford to have one Republican senator absent, assuming Vice President Mike Pence casts a tie-breaking vote and all other senators are present.

(A few scholars, most notably Laurence Tribe in a recent op-ed for the Globe, argue that the Constitution does not allow a vice president to break ties on nominations, just legislation and therefore that Pence would not be able to cast a vote to confirm Barrett. Most experts don’t share that view, and note that Democrats have not previously objected to Pence breaking ties on a handful of Trump nominations.)

Put another way: If the Senate were to vote today on Barrett’s nomination, and the three GOP senators currently known to be COVID-positive were absent, as they should be per public health protocols, the vote would fail 48-49, as Sarah Binder, a congressional expert and political scientist at George Washington University, recently wrote.

The Senate declined to pursue rule changes to allow senators to vote on the floor by proxy, which means each member must be physically present to vote.

The math is not as straightforward as it might seem.

In order to invoke cloture (a procedural requirement in the Senate which ends debate on a particular item) and to confirm her, Republicans must muster a majority of votes of those senators present and voting, which is not necessarily 51 votes if some members are out sick, noted Martin P. Paone, a senior advisor at Prime Policy Group who previously advised Democratic senators and leadership on Senate floor procedure.

If only 90 senators show up, Barrett’s nomination would need just 46 votes to be confirmed.

So if a bunch of Republicans get sick and follow the CDC guidelines and stay away, McConnell may not have the votes after all.

But Democrats shouldn’t get their hopes up, experts say. They still have little to no power to stop the confirmation.

“McConnell is a good counter of votes, he wouldn’t let that vote happen if he didn’t have the people around,” said Paone.

If the numbers aren’t there before the election, McConnell can call the vote during a lame-duck session after the November election.

Also, Republicans are already thinking about how to navigate the possibility of some of their members being infected by the time they need to vote.

Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, the third Republican senator to test positive in recent days, said in a Monday radio interview he’ll show up on the Senate floor in a “moon suit” if need be to cast a vote for Barrett.

“Where there is a will, there’s a way,” Johnson said on KHOW-630 radio.

Elsewhere, some GOP advisers have suggested sick Republicans can stand in the upstairs galleries overlooking the Senate floor and cast their votes.

This report includes material from the Associated Press

Victoria McGrane can be reached at victoria.mcgrane@globe.com. Follow her @vgmac.