SO NOW "THE PRESIDENT ISN'T REALLY THE PRESIDENT IN AN ELECTION YEAR" IS THE MODERATE POSITION, APPARENTLY

Politico wants us to believe that this is still an open question:

Unless you're laboring under the delusion that Republicans operate in good faith and regard Democratic presidents as legitimate, you know the answer: No Biden Supreme Court nominee will get a vote if Republicans win a Senate majority.

But much of our political press is, in fact laboring under multiple delusions about Republicans, including these. So Politico presents it as an open question.

Don’t ask Chuck Grassley how he’d handle another Supreme Court nomination from President Joe Biden.

“Ask me that question on Nov. 9,” said Grassley, who’s in line to run the Judiciary Committee if Republicans win back the Senate this fall. As for whether Americans deserve to know the GOP’s stance on Supreme Court picks ahead of the election, he only offered: “I’m not going to answer on something that’s speculation.”

... Republicans say they haven’t discussed the matter as a conference and, judging by their comments this week, they don’t have a unified position.

Oh -- so they might conclude that the president of the United States is, in fact, the president throughout all four years of his term, as the Constitution says he is, and might give any appointees a fair hearing?

No, not exactly. When Politico says Senate Republicans "don’t have a unified position," what's meant is that some of them want to take that constitutionally derived power away from the president for two years and some -- the moderates, I guess -- want to take it away for only one.

A vacancy in 2023 would be treated far differently than one in 2024, according to interviews with 10 GOP senators across the ideological spectrum. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), who is running to join elected GOP leadership, said she “would imagine that the same thought would apply in 2024: Let the next president make that decision. I don’t see that applying in 2023.”

Others aren’t so sure.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell isn’t saying much after blocking then-President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court pick Merrick Garland from even getting a hearing. Actually, he’s purposely saying nothing at all. Asked by Axios about how he would handle a vacancy, he replied Thursday: “I choose not to answer the question.”

... Preventing [Merrick] Garland from replacing the late Justice Antonin Scalia galvanized conservative voters in 2016, but Republicans may not want to do anything to ...

To what? Degrade the Constitution any more than they already have? Nahhhh:

... but Republicans may not want to do anything to diminish their chances of retaking the House and Senate.

So they're fine with blockades -- they're just not fine with telling us in advance that there'll be blockades.

But we're told that they genuinely haven't made up their minds:

Instead, Republicans are keeping their options open, depending on timing, circumstance and who a Biden nominee might be.

Oh, right -- if they block someone, it'll be Biden's fault, because he chose a dangerous radical extremist, like ... um, the most popular Supreme Court appointee in nearly two decades.

Former Judiciary Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) suggested Democratic nominees could need 60 votes — the old filibuster threshold for Supreme Court nominees — to pass muster with a Republican Senate. Someone like Ketanji Brown Jackson wouldn’t even be considered, he said.

But even Senator Graham would hate it if Biden forced Republicans to smack him around:

At the same time, he worried about the consequences of another blockade. “If the rule is [that] when you have one party in the Senate and another party in the White House you can’t get any judges ever, that’s sort of a bad outcome for the country,” Graham said. “You have the election-year rule ... But that first year, I don’t know what we would do.”

You have the election-year rule -- a "rule" that didn't exist until Mitch McConnell invented it.

God, I hate these people.