SCOTUS Judge Kennedy Resign

FLASHBACK: 

On Judicial Nominations, GOP Must Punish Democrats for Decades of Unprecedented Escalations.

Guy Benson tweets: “They talk as if Mitch/GOP stonewalling of Garland came out of nowhere. In fact, it was richly-earned vengeance” for decades of unilateral Democratic escalations & power grabs. A brief history.”

And from his 2017 column (linked above):

When Democrats continued their heretofore unforeseen practice of blocking up-or-down votes for majority-backed judicial nominees after the GOP regained the Senate in 2004, Republicans saber-rattled about invoking the so-called “nuclear option.” That fear led a bipartisan group of Senators, seven from each party, to forge the ‘Gang of 14′ compromise. The terms of that agreement survived a number of years until Democrats decided that they could not abide the GOP using the filibuster precedent they’d invented under Bush to thwart a limited number President Obama’s picks. For perspective, in their respective first terms, Obama had more of his circuit court nominees confirmed than Bush did — and enjoyed a better confirmation rate on district court selections than George H.W. Bush. Nevertheless, Democrats decided that the deployment of their own tactics against a Democratic president constituted a fresh justification to abolish the very practice they’d pioneered, detonating the “nuclear” option that many of them had inveighed against when Republicans were merely considering it as a method of overcoming Democrats’ previous unprecedented escalation. Some Reid defenders have argued that the former Democratic leader did everything he could to reason with Republicans to avoid going nuclear very early in Obama’s second term. Not true:

When Reid broke the filibuster [in 2013], he claimed the GOP could have avoided the nuclear option if they’d simply confirmed the seven appointees they’d been blocking. According to Politico, McConnell conceded to those demands to save the filibuster. At the last moment, Reid insisted that Republicans surrender the threat of filibustering any Obama’s appointments in the future.

Democrats single-handedly and unilaterally introduced the concept of judicial filibusters against majority-supported nominees, then proceeded to unilaterally end it, all over the course of about a decade. They started the practice when they were in the minority, then blew it up when they were in the majority.

Well, that’s different because shut up.