Think about the 2016 US Senate refusal to even consider Merrick Garland as a US Supreme Court nominee. This is a hack, a subversion of the Senate confirmation process. What’s interesting to me is that we don’t know if this hack has been normalized. We know that the Republicans weren’t punished for their hypocrisy when Amy Coney Barrett was nominated four years later. We’ll learn the new normal the next time a Supreme Court seat opens up when one party controls the presidency and the other party controls the Senate.
