This story was originally published on nationaljournal.com on Feb. 14, 2016 This past weekend, we saw a microcosm of much of what is wrong in American politics. About an hour after it was confirmed that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had died, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pronounced, “this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.” Only minutes later, President Obama, on a golfing vacation in Rancho Mirage, California, said that he would move ahead with a nomination “in due time.” Less than 12 hours after Scalia was found dead of natural causes, the Democratic National Committee was out with a fundraising-solicitation email. What class. A venerable jurist was barely dead, and the fight over his replacement had already begun. Democrats were outraged at McConnell’s suggestion that the Senate would not take up a nomination. But when my Democratic friends were asked, if the circumstances were reversed, whether Harry Reid would allow a Republican president in his last year in office to put a new member on the high court, I heard a lot of sputtering.
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