Judge Neil Gorsuch speaks after President Trump announced his decision to nominate Gorsuch for the Supreme Court. (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)

When Antonin Scalia died almost a year ago, the Republican Senate majority made a decision: The Supreme Court justice’s seat would remain unfilled until after the presidential election.

The reason for this was simple and obvious. Republicans wanted to have a chance to have a member of their own party nominate someone to a position that he or she might hold for decades. Last February, it wasn’t clear who that Republican would be, and it wasn’t clear that any Republican would prevail in the general election, but it was worth a shot. Worth a roll of the dice. And, with President Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch on Tuesday, the strategy paid out the jackpot.

Of course, they had to offer some sort of rationale for why they were holding the seat open. The go-to excuse was that it was an election year, and they needed the American people to weigh in on the decision. It was common to note that few Supreme Court appointments had been made in election years in the past, which was in part a function of there being limited vacancies that overlapped with that period. But this was all just rationalization, as everyone knew. It was just D.C. doing its D.C. thing, as D.C. does.

At the time, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas was hoping to be that Republican president. The evening of the day Scalia died, Cruz endorsed the wait-until-after-November strategy. Or, as he might have phrased it, the wait-until-me strategy.

After the announcement of Gorsuch on Tuesday, CNN’s Jim Acosta found Cruz in the audience and spoke to him about the pick.

“You’ve seen the partisanship, the way it’s been the last several days since President Trump took office,” Acosta said. “Is this something Judge Gorsuch can overcome? You have democrats holding up nominees across the president’s cabinet picks.”

“There is no doubt that the Democrats are engaged right now in unprecedented partisan obstruction,” Cruz replied. “I hope on the Supreme Court that they will not engage in that practice.”

Acosta pointed out that Democrats might be tempted to return the Republicans’ obstruction of Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, with obstruction of their own.

“It is a fundamentally different circumstance,” Cruz replied. “One, no vacancy that occurred in a presidential election year has been filled for 80 years, eight decades. And indeed what Republicans said when that vacancy occurred before any nomination was made, is we’re going to allow the American people to decide, we have a presidential election coming. This election was in a very real sense a referendum, a referendum for the American people.”

“We the people spoke on Election Day in November,” he continued. “This issue I believe was a vital issue to President Trump defeating Hillary Clinton and now, respecting the will of the people, it’s incumbent on the Senate to advise and consent.”

Cruz uses four rationalizations in those snippets, which can be evaluated on their own merits.

1. “Democrats are engaged right now in unprecedented partisan obstruction.” It is true that Trump’s Cabinet nominees are being approved at an unusually slow pace, but “unprecedented partisan obstruction” is a big stone to toss around that fragile glass house.
2. “It is a fundamentally different circumstance” since no election-year vacancy had been filled in 80 years. Eighty years, in the span of U.S. history, isn’t really that long a time, though it sounds like a long time. And, of course, there were only 20 election years over that time period.
3. “This election was in a very real sense a referendum, a referendum for the American people.” This is a particularly tricky argument to make, since the winner of a referendum is usually the one who wins more votes — which, last November, was Hillary Clinton.
4. “This issue I believe was a vital issue to President Trump defeating Hillary Clinton.” This is likely true. Among those who thought Supreme Court appointments were the most important issue at stake, Trump won a majority of the vote, according to exit polls. Many Republicans who were otherwise wavering on his candidacy voted for Trump knowing that he would then be able to make court appointments.

But what Cruz is saying with that fourth point is, essentially, that the Senate’s strategy of holding the seat open helped Trump win. Probably true — but not necessarily a great argument for having held it open. Really, the reason Cruz makes the fourth point is to reinforce the third point which is to reinforce the second point which is to reinforce the point of his tweet. In short: We did the right thing because it paid off for us. We held the seat so voters could weigh in, and they sort of weighed in for Trump, so it was the right thing to do. It’s hard to overstate the extent to which Trump losing the popular vote undercuts this entire line of argument, but the entire point of this article is that these arguments were empty from the outset.

There’s a better example. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell owned the blockade strategy. He absorbed much of the flak at the front end for it, but insisted, like Cruz, that the seat be held open. It was quickly noted that in 2005, under President Bush, he’d said that “any President’s judicial nominees, after full debate, deserve a simple up-or-down vote,” but he ignored such hypocrisies.

“The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court justice,” he instead said last year. “Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”

On Tuesday, he offered his thoughts on Trump’s appointment.

“This is the beginning of a four-year term, not the middle of a presidential election,” he said. “So let’s talk about apples and apples, and not apples and oranges.” At another point he said, “What I would expect from our Democratic friends is that the nominee be handled similarly to Clinton’s and Obama’s first two nominees in their first terms.”

That Donald Trump has already filed for reelection notwithstanding, McConnell seems to be setting another tricky bar that may need to be met. What happens if Trump wins that reelection and is asked to fill a Court vacancy? Is a second-term appointment an apple in McConnell’s formulation?

(Pew Research) (Pew Research)

We know the answer to that, of course. It doesn’t matter. This is the golden age of partisanship, a time when members of each party are highly distrustful of their political opponents. McConnell won’t pay a price from his base; the price paid will be in increased cynicism about how D.C. operates, though that tank is so full that it’s hard to see how much more damage could be done.

Republicans held Scalia’s seat open so that they could fill it with a Republican. There was no more complicated reason than that, and suggestions otherwise were always nonsense. Fine. But rationalizations about what’s different now are equally hollow and deserve to be treated as such.