Shared Delusions

I would like to highlight this remarkable passage from the CNN article about Joe Manchin announcing his intention to do his level best to end the democratic experiment in America cited by Paul below:

The moderate Democrat has in the past argued that Democrats who want to abolish the filibuster should be careful what they wish for, noting how then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s move in 2013 to remove the 60-vote filibuster standard for presidential nominees other than those on the Supreme Court — a change that eventually allowed Republicans to install a conservative majority on the high court.

The story simply states as fact — not just summarizing Manchin’s arrant bullshit — that the Democrats going nuclear in 2013 “allowed” Mitch McConnell to eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court justices. This is extraordinarily stupid. Anyone who thinks McConnell would have allowed a Democratic minority to keep a Supreme Court vacancy open for 4 years if only Dems had allowed Republicans to blockade the D.C. Circuit and nullify the CFPB and NLRB would spend half their life savings on a Ph.D. from Trump University and the other half on oceanfront property in Kansas. The Democrats didn’t “allow” McConnell to do anything, and indeed the only reason that Republicans didn’t go nuclear under Bush is that Senate Dems completely capitulated and allowed most of Bush’s radical nominees to be confirmed in exchange for absolutely nothing. But Murc’s Law has been enabling Republican backsliding on democracy for many years, so why stop now?