POLITICO PUTS THE BIPARTISANSHIP BAR A MILLIMETER FROM THE GROUND FOR THE GOP

All that Republicans have to do in order to be seen as engaged in bipartisanship is to send out a handful of the party's senators to pretend that they might vote for Joe Biden's Supreme Court appointee. Here's the story from Politico:

Mitt Romney and Roy Blunt are torn over the same Supreme Court quandary: whether to shake off GOP pressure to oppose Ketanji Brown Jackson and vote for the first Black woman justice.

Though Jackson hasn’t even had her confirmation hearing yet, the independent-minded Romney and retiring Blunt are trying to balance the historic nature of her nomination with her more liberal judicial philosophy. Romney voted against Jackson’s nomination to D.C.'s influential appellate court last year, and Blunt missed the vote. Now both find themselves weighing whether to treat her high court bid differently.

“It’s historic for an African American woman to be nominated,” Romney said in an interview. “My heart would like to be able to vote for her confirmation. But I will not do so unless I’m satisfied she is in the mainstream of judicial thought and consistent with what I think the course of our judicial philosophy will be.”

Blunt recently spoke to President Joe Biden about the Supreme Court vacancy. He said of Jackson: “I would love to vote for the first Black woman on the court. But at some point judicial philosophy will and should be a significant determining factor.”

Translation: Neither one will vote for her -- not the guy who's retiring and not the guy whose stature in Utah is so great that he can't possibly lose an election.

They won't vote for her because Republicans, with one voice, will tell us soon that she's "radical" and "extreme" (some have already said that), even though most of them know -- Romney and Blunt certainly know -- that she's well within the mainstream, and that Republican Supreme Court appointees really are extremists, and are chosen precisely because they're extremists.

This phony-reasonable act serves two purposes: It persuades swing voters that Republicans are moderate and mainstream, and it acts as evidence that the nominee really is a dangerous radical -- if she can't even get the votes of Mitt Romney and Roy Blunt, the souls of moderation, who wanted so badly to vote for the first African-American woman appointed to the Court, then she must be really bad!

Politico tells us:

Privately, Democrats aren’t expecting more than a handful of Republicans to support Jackson for the high court. Her nomination to her current position on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals last year only won three Republican votes....

Senate Democrats, however, are hoping that the historic nature of Jackson’s nomination could convince some in the GOP to support her this time around. It doesn’t hurt that five Republican senators are retiring, relieving them of electoral considerations.

But we've just been told that Blunt is retiring, and yet he's making ominous references to "judicial philosophy." So when we're informed that several Republicans have "said they’re not closing the door on Jackson’s nomination and that their previous votes against her aren’t necessarily a final verdict," we shouldn't believe it.

Democrats are portrayed as extremist redicals no matter how much they reach across the aisle, while Republicans get credit for just pretending to be bipartisan. So why should the GOP do more?