Washington leaders: Do your jobs

President Donald Trump is performing his constitutional responsibilities by picking a nominee for the Supreme Court and sending her to the Senate for confirmation hearings.

Just as in 2016, when President Obama nominated Merrick Garland for the high court following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, it is incumbent upon the leader of the executive branch to fulfill his transactional duties, and despite the partisan noise, it is absolutely the norm.

In 2016, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) refused to even consider Obama’s nominee on the grounds that it was an election year.

In his remarks on the Senate floor following Scalia’s death, McConnell said, “Of course it’s within the president’s authority to nominate a successor even in this very rare circumstance — remember that the Senate has not filled a vacancy arising in an election year when there was divided government since 1888, almost 130 years ago.”

In an OpEd at the time, McConnell massaged his message a bit, writing, “Given that we are in the midst of the presidential election process, we believe that the American people should seize the opportunity to weigh in on whom they trust to nominate the next person for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.”

McConnell’s too-cute-byhalf suggestion that nominations should not be held in an election year is exposed in 2020 as completely hypocritical and extremely divisive in an already tumultuous political and cultural atmosphere.

Regardless of what McConnell contrives to be the reason for stonewalling Garland, the fact is that the Constitution empowers the Senate to grant advice and consent in confirming justices to the Supreme Court.

McConnell was not the only Republican Senator to make a complete turnaround on the matter in just four years.

In 2016, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham was adamant that Obama’s nominee should be blocked during an election year and he even dared his colleagues to hold him to it.

In a Senate hearing he declared, “I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in

2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.”

It is not just Republicans who have had a change of heart about confirming Supreme Court Justices. Democrats, too, are occupying an opposite ideological space in 2020 than they did in 2016.

New York Sen. Chuck Schumer demanded that Republicans move forward with hearings for Garland in 2016, tweeting, “.@POTUS’s constitutional responsibility is to nominate a #SCOTUS Justice. The Senate’s job is to hold hearings & vote on nominees #DoYourJob.”

Vice President Joe Biden has done the same.

In fact, almost all of our elected partisans in Washington, D.C., have completely evolved on the issue in four short years.

Thus is Washington.

Are they hypocrites? Yes. Is it shameful? Yes.

However, we all bear some responsibility for their dishonorable actions, as we consent to them by sending these men and women back to Washington after every six-year term. We could end the tradition of shameless opportunism instantly if our elected leaders feared our retribution at the ballot box.

Until that happens we have the Constitution as our bulwark.

In 2016 Senate Republicans should have given President Obama’s nominee a hearing in the Senate. Instead, their cowardly obstinance planted a seed that has sprouted into another toxic weed four years later at a very inopportune time.

The Senate must have hearings and vote one way or another on the nominee, Amy Coney Barrett. In uncertain times we must tether ourselves to institutional norms and jettison cynical political habits.