Isn't it rich that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on Tuesday warned Democrats that the "future of the Senate" hangs in the balance if they filibuster Neil Gorsuch's Supreme Court nomination?
"It should be unsettling to everyone that our colleagues across the aisle have brought the Senate to this new low," McConnell said from the Senate floor Tuesday. He was referring to the fact that most Senate Democrats will not vote to approve Gorsuch and McConnell will likely invoke the "nuclear option" - the once-unthinkable mechanism for changing the rules so Supreme Court nominees can be cleared through the Senate with only a simple majority, rather than a two-thirds majority.
This, of course, is the same Sen. McConnell who brought the Senate to its all-time low when he held former President Obama's Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland hostage for nearly a year - refusing outright to even meet with Garland, let alone allow a Senate vote on him.
This is the same Sen. McConnell who from the moment Obama was elected vowed openly to oppose and obstruct everything Obama did, hoping in vain to make him a one-term president.
McConnell said Democrats could still "do the right thing."
That, too, is really rich.
Doing "the right thing" must have been what McConnell and friends were thinking when, in Obama's fifth year in office, nearly 30 of his uncontroversial judicial and political nominations had been blocked from votes by GOP filibuster - compared to about 20 nominees of other presidents in the decades before Obama. With vacancies slowing government business, then-Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid of Nevada first pulled a mini-nuclear option to eliminate filibuster for lower court nominations and executive branch nominations. Reid preserved the filibuster and full vote for Supreme Court nominees.
Now McConnell would blow that up, too.
"Democrats are being pushed by far-left interest groups into doing something detrimental to this body and for our country," McConnell said. "They seem determined to head into the abyss" and take the country with them.
McConnell - like Donald Trump - is clearly incapable of taking any responsibility himself for heading "into the abyss."
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., is correct when he says that McConnell's denying a vote for Garland was even worse than a filibuster. Schumer also is correct in saying no one is forcing McConnell to change the rules.
McConnell has been making up his own rules for a long time.