If it were a sentient being, the institution of the Senate would self-immolate in response to the stunning amount of hypocrisy oozing out of every Republican.
"Presidents deserve to have their teams in place—it is that simple," Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri and chairman of the Rules Committee, told the panel last week. "It applies to whatever party occupies the White House."
That's how they are justifying a "mini-nuclear" option they are about to pass to get the Russian asset's nominations through the Senate at a faster clip and with even less scrutiny. They are going to shorten the required debate time for executive and some judicial branch nominees—the cloture "ripening" hours—from as many as 30 hours to just two. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the man bent on dismantling every vestige of the institution, who blockaded an imminently qualified Supreme Court nominee of a Democratic president, says, "I just don’t think it is fair in any way to continue the practice we have seen on full display here. […] It is time for the Senate to change the practice before it becomes so pervasive that the genie never gets back in the bottle." That practice being Democrats forcing the full 30 hours of debate.
Look at the stats: In the first two years of the Trump administration, there have been 53 district court judges confirmed; President Obama had 15. There have been 30 appellate court judges from Trump confirmed in the past two years—the most ever. Those, and two Supreme Court justices. It's worth mentioning that there are so many vacancies for Trump to fill in large part because Republicans all but shut down the confirmation of these lifetime appointments under Obama. It's also worth mentioning that many of these nominees were pushed through over the objections of home state senators. Democrats have been all but shut out of the process.
So when McConnell is telling Democrats that they're forcing him to do this because of their obstruction, it's adding insult to injury. "It has created some hard feelings because it was consciously done in the hopes that your party would win the next presidential election, and you did," Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin told McConnell. "When we talk about records of obstruction, I think that record has been broken at the highest level."
