“genuinely victimized by the prospect of equality”

Michelle Goldberg delivers a well-above 8th grade civics lesson to Ben Sasse:

Now, facing another presidential election that they expect to lose, Republicans are caterwauling about Democratic calls to expand the court. As they prepare to jam through Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, Republicans are shocked — shocked! — that Democrats would contemplate playing constitutional hardball just as Republicans do. If Democrats jettison the Senate filibuster and add judges to the Supreme Court, Senator Ben Sasse said on “Fox News Sunday,” they’d be “suicide bombing” American institutions.

Say this for Republicans: They are very good at umbrage. It might even be sincere; from Reconstruction to the New Deal to the civil rights revolution, conservatives have long felt genuinely victimized by the prospect of equality. That doesn’t mean, however, that bad-faith right-wing arguments about the courts merit a respectful hearing.

The closest thing I can say to a good thing about Sasse is that he’s such an obviously smarmy fraud that the media’s attempts to cast him as the One Noble Mavericky Republican Because There Must Be One seems to have petered out in record time.

It is trivially obvious that Republicans have no commitment to a 9-person Court that would last a second beyond Democrats getting the median vote. Another way you can see this is what Republicans have done at the state level:

Meanwhile, Republicans tried to expand top-level courts in several states they controlled, succeeding in Arizona and Georgia. As Politico reported, even as Arizona trends away from the Republican Party, “thanks to the Republican-led expansion, the conservative makeup of Arizona’s Supreme Court likely will stay in place for more than a decade.”

Republicans did all this because they could. Now that Democrats might respond in kind, diluting conservative control of the courts and thus depriving Republicans of their prize for enabling Trump, Republicans have the audacity to pose as scandalized norm-protectors.

Republicans have clearly established the new norms, and it would be deeply foolish for Democrats to unilaterally disarm.

Meanwhile, here’s Ben being repeatedly dunked on by an actual 8th grader.