EIGHT THOUGHTS ON SCALIA FROM JONAH GOLDBERG:

3. The double-standard for Republicans is not shocking but it remains galling. As Jim Geraghty notes in today’s Jolt, Chuck Schumer took exactly the same position on any further Bush appointments in 2007. I don’t seem to recall the shock and outrage we’re seeing today.

4. On that note, Ruth Marcus — an often independent-minded liberal — offers some classic concern trolling of the GOP today in her column. She writes:

Finally, a Senate work stoppage would, in fact, be bad for Republicans. In the nation’s capital these days, everything is political, every institution politicized. That may be inevitable and irreparable, yet tables here have a way of turning. One party’s obstructionism ends up hurting it down the road.

Marcus is surely right that tables can turn. What she leaves out is the simple, glaring, fact that the tables are turning on Democrats who’ve been playing outrageous games with appointment process for a quarter century. When Robert Bork was defenestrated by Joe Biden, despite having said he would have no choice but to vote for someone so well-qualified, he was setting the tables for payback. When Harry Reid pulled the trigger on the nuclear option (on lower court appointments) he was warned that this would come back to haunt him. When Democrats disgustingly blocked Miguel Estrada from the bench solely because he was a Hispanic, they set the table to be turned. When Barack Obama voted to filibuster Alito, he set the table to be turned.

Cry me no tears now that Republicans are finally putting their shoulders to the table.

And note this: “If Scalia’s interpretation of the Constitution held sway in the land, the Court and the government would have much less power over our lives. And that, more than anything else, explains why the left hated him so much.”

Read the whole thing.