Because it had nothing to do with business

Thoughts on the Garland pick:

Obama’s decision to nominate Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court is what in technical legal terms is known as a gangster move. It puts Senate Republicans in a basically impossible position – as if the 24 GOP senators up for re-election this November didn’t already have enough problems, what with the ticket almost certain to be headed by a full-fledged disaster of a presidential candidate. (It’s actually hard to say whether Donald Trump or Ted Cruz is less electable, but either of them is basically a worst-case scenario for down ticket GOP candidates.) . . .

Confirming Garland before next year, however, is almost out of the question. Such an act would throw the GOP base, already in the throes of the belief that they have been “betrayed” by RINO squishes, into a rabid frenzy that would make the average Trump rally look like graduate school seminar.

So Garland almost certainly won’t get a vote, or at least not until next year. But that decision in turn has a non-trivial chance of playing a role in flipping the Senate back to the Democrats. Indeed, the only scenario in which a vote on Scalia’s now-vacant seat is likely to happen this year is this one: October rolls around, and it has become all too clear to Senate Republicans that Donald Trump or Ted Cruz is going down in flames, and that he will be taking a whole bunch of GOP senators with him. Only then, perhaps, may they decide that Obama has made them an offer they can’t refuse.

By then, however, they may well find that today’s offer has been withdrawn. In any case, no matter what happens, Obama will expect them not to take it personally. After all, it’s just business.