There was a large enough group of Republicans in the senate to prevent the issue from even being put to a vote. They didn't vote him down, they refused to give him a hearing at all.
Yeah, I'm up to speed on all that, but wasn't it historically unprecedented? Sure is a lot of that going around lately.
Civil government is a mechanism of consent. Garland never got a hearing because the Republicans asserted they would not consent civilly to the historical mechanism. Obama could have appointed Garland through a couple-three different approaches, but doing so would have signaled that the consent that keeps government civil was eroding further. It's a game of brinksmanship - how far are you willing to push the Jenga stack to get your way? With the Republicans daring Obama to knock it over, his choice was to prop up their bullshit brinksmanship. The Obama administration judged that governance of the United States was fragile and that the best path for the nation was to let the Republicans have their tantrum. I'm not sure I agree and I reckon this particular period of history will be studied for a long time... particularly when the next guy in the seat didn't realize he was paying Jenga. There's literally nothing stopping Trump from issuing an executive order banning Muslims on a Friday afternoon. However, as has been amply demonstrated, it's not the cleanest, easiest way to go about it. Historically, presidents have understood the delicacy and nuance necessary to keep a three-headed representative democracy firing on all cylinders. Now, however, we're going to test the limits.
I'm not sure I agree. I would argue that the relevant platitude is that locks keep out the polite. It doesn't take a lot of impoliteness before guard dogs and fences go up. Obama and the Republicans had disagreements about what should be behind lock and key but they both wanted to live in polite society. Steve Bannon may be the only one using a crowbar, but he isn't the only person who owns one.
It does lead to some interesting counterfactuals to consider what the country may have looked like if Obama didn't spend all his change on the ACA, and instead focused solely on job creation. Let's not forget that the tea party grew out of a backlash to the ACA, although I'm not sure it wouldn't have still popped up if health wasn't the issue at hand. Maybe when the GOP repasses Obamacare and calls it something else things can begin to get back to a more normal power/opposition situation. I fear, however, that ideological purity on both sides (yes, liberals, you're horrible at this, too) has entrenched itself very deep.
Shit, if we're going to get that off-rails we might as well wonder what Hilary could have accomplished if she hadn't gone to the mattresses over Hilarycare in 1992. Here's the thing that blows my mind: The Clintons worked hard on Hilarycare after doing a stint on the board of directors at Walmart. Healthcare isn't as big a portion of the expenses for a corporation like Walmart because of the way they pretty much fuck everybody, but lack of healthcare certainly is. Offload healthcare onto the government and literally every business makes more money except insurance and pharmaceuticals. So why don't the other industry trade groups band together to kick the shit out of insurance and pharmaceuticals? No doubt because they're all making money on insurance and pharmaceuticals. Sony's biggest revenue generator? Insurance. It seems like a halfway clever trade segment could push socialized medicine from a business standpoint. I mean, Toyota bailed on Tennessee for Canada because they didn't incur healthcare expenses there (and the general standard of worker education was higher, but baby steps). You'd think Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle and everybody else could say "we want the government to pay for insurance so we can be more competitive."
With things that are unprecedented but not necessarily illegal, what can you do? Some legal scholars think that the Senate has a constitutional responsibility to hold hearings, some think that "advise and consent" means that withholding hearings was a type or advisement, and others think that failure to act was a dereliction of duty and the court could have seated him. The fact is that only the federal courts system could have parsed this, and that created several problems. First, who has standing to sue? The president? Senate democrats? Garland himself? It's unclear who was injured and standing is a big deal in lawsuits. Second, the multitudes of injunctions and counter suits that were inevitable probably would have delayed the case until now anyway. Third, do you really want to mess with the independence of the Senate. Despite their current shortsightedness, they should be an independent body. All these things made it so no one could really do much beyond gripe in the media. The fact is that now there is a precedent, however. The Senate clearly can delay any nomination for as long as they please, and nobody can do a thing about it. I hope the Democrats don't take the same tack when they're back in power.
Thanks to both you and kleinbl00, this was the exact context I was looking for. I apologize for outsourcing my ignorance, but you two have saved me a fair bit of reading with these condensed paragraphs.