The hints of what this final year of President Obama's term was going to be like, The New York Times' Carl Hurse writes, were there when Republicans told his budget director not to even bother presenting his spending plan. It became abundantly clear with the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia that the opposition had reached "an entirely new level" when Republicans announced "they would not even shake hands with a Supreme Court nominee selected by the duly elected president of the United States." In trying to justify why they're doing something no other Senate has done, Republicans try to sound principled—and deflect attention from the fact that it's the nation's first black president that they're thwarting—by blaming it on the mean Democrats.
"They would never have done it," Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama and a member of the Judiciary Committee, said of the prospect that Democrats would confirm a Republican nominee in the last year of a Republican president's tenure. […]
Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who sits on the Judiciary Committee and has backed Democratic Supreme Court picks in the past, said the court fight was payback for the 2013 decision by Senate Democrats to unilaterally change Senate rules to make it easier to break Republican filibusters against executive branch nominations. They then pushed more Obama administration nominees onto the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, perhaps the most important court below the Supreme Court.
"This is the consequence of an abuse of power," Mr. Graham said. "Don't ask for fairness if you are not going to give it."
Except, of course, Democrats have confirmed a Republican nominee in the last year of a Republican president's tenure. Graham's justification that it's "payback" is equally petty and equally bogus, considering the Republicans' record-level obstruction of this president's nominees and agenda. And they're not even embarrassed at the kind of history they're making.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) says he doesn't care how history judges him for refusing to consider President Obama's next nominee for the Supreme Court.
"Do you think I spend my days wondering about how Chuck Grassley will go down in history?" he told reporters on Wednesday, according to The Des Moines Register.
"I don't care if I ever go down in history," added Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. "I'm here to do my job."
His job—every senator's job—is to give advice and consent to the president on Supreme Court nominees. Any president. Any nominee. There's no justification at all for absolute refusal to do that, and certainly no principle in it.