KURT EICHENWALD: Neil Gorsuch Is Supremely Qualified, and Must Not Be Confirmed.

Gorsuch, unfortunately, must be sacrificed on the altar of obscene partisanship erected by the Republicans in recent years. Temper tantrums designed to undermine the Constitution for naked political purposes cannot be rewarded. Our government cannot survive the short-term games-playing that has replaced fidelity to the intent of the Founding Fathers’ work in forming this once-great nation.

This goes back to the unconscionable decision of Republicans who refused to consider any nominee put forward by President Barack Obama following the death of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. Obama nominated Merrick Garland, another eminently qualified candidate who served as chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the second most important court in the nation. But in a decision that will go down as one of the greatest abuses of the Constitution in this nation’s history, the Senate’s Republican majority, under the leadership of their unprincipled majority leader, Mitch McConnell, declared they would not give Garland hearings, would not examine his qualifications and would not take a vote.

Instead, they made up a rule: A nominee for the Supreme Court can be considered for only three-quarters of any president’s term. In the fourth year, confirmations have to wait until after the election. And so the Supreme Court has been hobbled for coming up on one year—and, because the confirmation hearings will inevitably drag on, for months more to come.

It’s called “the Biden rule,” Kurt. Named after its author, Democrat Senator Joe Biden. You might have heard of him. He was Democrat President Barack Obama’s Democrat Vice President for the last eight years. Anyway, Joe came up with the Biden Rule in 1992 when the Democrats controlled the Senate, to stop Republican President Bush from naming a conservative to the court during the last quarter of his Administration. Some might have considered that a partisan act.

And a Republican-controlled Senate seems, shall we say, somewhat unlikely to tip the ideological balance of the Senate leftward, Kurt, when they have been armed with a weapon of pure partisanship — the nuclear option — forged by Democrat Harry Reid. You might have heard of him, too. Reid once used Senate trickery to pass ObamaCare over the strenuous objections of 41 Republican Senators — including a brand-new Republican Senator sent there by the people of Massachusetts, Kurt, for the express purpose of stopping Reid’s partisan antics. But Reid was a wily devil and overturned a couple centuries of Senate rules and traditions to pass the most partisan major legislation since… ever, maybe.

So if the GOP installs Neil Gorsuch — who earned his previous position with the vote of every single Senate Democrat — without a single Democrat vote, it will be thanks to the normalization of hyperpartisanship… by Democrats.

It might not be a very tasty sandwich, Kurt, but it’s Biden and Reid’s recipe.