President Donald Trump's pick for the US Supreme Court, Judge Neil Gorsuch, was confirmed by the US Senate on Friday, capping a political brawl that lasted for more than a year and tested constitutional norms inside the Capitol's fraying upper chamber.

The development was a triumph for President Donald Trump, whose campaign last year rested in large part on his pledge to appoint another committed conservative to succeed Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February 2016. However rocky the first months of his administration may have been, Mr Trump now has a lasting legacy: Mr Gorsuch, 49, could serve on the court for 30 years or more.

Vice President Mike Pence presided over the final vote Friday, a show of force for the White House on a day when his tiebreaking vote as president of the Senate was not necessary.

The confirmation was also a vindication of the bare-knuckled strategy of Senate Republicans, who refused even to consider President Barack Obama's Supreme Court pick, Judge Merrick B. Garland, saying the choice of the next justice should belong to the next president.

Yet the bruising confrontation has left the Senate a changed place. Friday's vote was only possible after the Senate discarded long-standing rules meant to ensure mature deliberation and bipartisan cooperation, particularly in considering Supreme Court nominees. On Thursday, after Democrats waged a filibuster against Mr Gorsuch, denying him the 60 votes required to advance to a final vote, Republicans invoked the so-called nuclear option: lowering the threshold on Supreme Court nominations to a simple majority vote.

The confirmation saga did not help the reputation of the Supreme Court, either. The justices say politics plays no role in their work, but the public heard an unrelentingly different story over the last year, with politicians, pundits and well-financed outside groups insisting that a Democratic nominee would rule differently from a Republican one.

Mr Gorsuch possesses the credentials typical of the modern Supreme Court justice. He is a graduate of Columbia, Harvard and Oxford, served as a Supreme Court law clerk and worked as a lawyer at a prestigious Washington law firm and at the Justice Department. He joined the US Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in Denver, in 2006, where he was widely admired as a fine judicial stylist.

During 20 hours of questioning from senators during his confirmation hearings last month, Mr Gorsuch said almost nothing of substance. He presented himself as a folksy servant of neutral legal principles, and senators had little success in eliciting anything but canned answers.

But neither side harboured any doubts, based on the judge's opinions, other writings and the president who nominated him, that Mr Gorsuch would be a reliable conservative committed to following the original understanding of those who drafted and ratified the Constitution.

A week from Monday, Mr Gorsuch will put on his robes, follow the court's custom of shaking hands with each of his colleagues and ascend to the Supreme Court bench to hear his first arguments. A ninth chair, absent since the spring of 2016, will be waiting for him.

He is not a stranger to the court, having served as a law clerk in 1993 and 1994 to Justice Byron White, who died in 2002, and Justice Anthony Kennedy, who continues to hold the crucial vote in many closely divided cases.

Mr Gorsuch will be the first former Supreme Court clerk to serve alongside a former boss. And he may recall Mr White's observation about how transformative a new addition to the bench can be. "Every time a new justice comes to the Supreme Court," Mr White liked to say, "it's a different court."

The court has been short-handed since Mr Scalia's death on February 13, 2016. Within hours, the Republican majority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said the seat would not be filled until a new administration came to power.

It was perhaps the most audacious escalation in a series of precedent-busting Senate skirmishes in recent decades - tracing from Democratic opposition to Judge Robert Bork and Justice Clarence Thomas to the wide-scale use of the filibuster by Republicans under Obama. Republicans have pinned blame squarely on their opponents, citing Democratic blockades of judicial nominees under President George W. Bush and a rule change in 2013, when Democrats controlled the Senate, barring the filibuster for lower judgeships and executive branch nominees.

But by design, that move left the Supreme Court filibuster untouched. Democrats have insisted that history remember who toppled this final emblem of minority party influence over confirmations.

"They have had other choices," Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said of Republicans, after arguing for weeks that the nomination should be withdrawn if Mr Gorsuch could not earn 60 votes. "They have chosen this one."

Over the last year, the eight-justice court has deadlocked a few times, but it has employed all kinds of strategies to avoid being completely hobbled. The justices have ducked some cases, issued vanishingly narrow decisions in others and slow-walked still others, waiting for a ninth justice to resolve what would otherwise be a 4-4 tie.

The New York Times