This has been screamingly obvious since forever, or at least since Moscow Mitch McConnell stole a Supreme Court seat from President Barack Obama, but the Senate majority leader has once again confirmed that he has different rules when a Republican is president. When Obama was president and had a vacancy to fill and a nominee, McConnell reached into his bag of lies to come up with the claim that you can't fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court in an election year.
That is, of course, out the window in this election year, with a Republican incumbent. "If you're asking me a hypothetical about whether this Republican Senate would confirm a member of the Supreme Court due to a vacancy created this year—yeah, we would fill it," he told Fox News last week. In 2016, though, he insisted, "The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice.” That, by the way, was what he tweeted on the very day the world found out that Justice Antonin Scalia had died.
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Then he cooked up a rationale for this, and to troll Obama even harder, he called it the "Biden Rule," based on nothing really, except something then-Vice President Joe Biden had once said years ago about a hypothetical situation. And he got away with it.
He got away with it, and has spent the last four years gloating over it, saying, "One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, 'Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.'"
He's gloating and trolling now when he says that he would absolutely fill a vacancy this year. Because that's what he does. Our job is to make sure he never has a majority in the Senate again to do it with.