JONATHAN ADLER: Thoughts on the judicial nominations mess and nuclear fallout.

How did we get here?

In my opinion, the story of judicial nominations over the past 30 years is a story of repeated, escalating retaliation. Instead of tit-for-tat, it’s been (tit+X)-for-tat. At each turn, each party has escalated as much as it thought it could get away with, tearing down norms and breaking precedents over again. Put another way, senators from both parties have acted like two kids in the back seat of a car, taking turns hitting each other, with each “punching back twice as hard.” After trading enough blows, how it started is almost irrelevant.

Different people trace the beginnings of this current cycle of retaliation to different points. In my view, it began in the mid-1980s, when Senate Democrats decided that they should do more to oppose President Ronald Reagan’s nominees because they were too ideological — a decision that was reported in The Post at the time. I explain this and discuss what happened since in this post from 2013. Whether Senate Democrats were justified in their action is irrelevant at this point, as it’s been almost all downhill since. There are no clean hands.

2013, of course, is when Reid invoked the so-called nuclear option (a.k.a. the #ReidRule).

And now Republicans are invoking it back. The big problem is that nobody trusts anybody to keep promises made when they’re out of power once they’re back in power, and they’re right not to.

But as Adler notes, this makes it easier for Presidents to pick a wider range of nominees, which is good.