The grounds for that premise are obvious enough: Mitch McConnell’s audacious refusal to even consider confirming Barack Obama’s March 2016 nomination of Merrick Garland to fill the vacancy created by Antonin Scalia’s death just over a month earlier. That McConnell was acting strictly as a partisan warrior on this occasion was made clear in 2020, when he quickly discarded his stated prior opposition to presidential-election-year Supreme Court appointments and rushed Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation through the Senate just weeks before Trump was defeated by Joe Biden.