Stand by your word, Sen. Rubio, and against the dash for a Supreme Court appointment

Mark these words: “I don’t think we should be moving forward with a nominee in the last year of this president’s term. I would say that even if it was a Republican president.”

So said U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, after the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia four years ago.

Here’s what Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate majority leader, similarly said.

“The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”

Scalia died nearly nine months before the election. When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died last Friday, there were just 47 days to go before the next election.

As history also recalls, after Scalia died, McConnell would not allow the Senate to even hold a hearing, let alone a vote, for Merrick Garland, the superbly qualified and decidedly moderate federal appeals court judge whom President Barack

Obama had nominated to replace him. Only two Republican senators spoke up to say Garland deserved at least a hearing. His nomination languished for 293 days until it expired when the last Congress did.

However, almost immediately upon hearing of Ginsburg’s death, McConnell and President Donald Trump began plotting to replace her right away, no matter her “fervent last wish” that she not be replaced “until a new president is installed.”

It is usually an exercise in futility to encourage Rubio to stand up to the president who belittled him during the 2016 primaries or to the majority leader who takes his obedience for granted.

But Rubio isn’t supposed to be working for them. He represents the people of Florida, who, the polls say, are deeply divided about President Trump.

It would behoove Rubio to consider what happened to two other Senate Republicans in closely fought states after they agreed to block the Garland nomination. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Mark Kirk of Illinois both lost. Rubio may not be up for re-election this year, but 2022 is right around the corner.

Rubio hasn’t said whether he feels bound by what he said four years ago, but to succeed Ginsburg, he, Sen. Rick Scott and Gov. Ron DeSantis are said to be feverishly promoting Barbara Lagoa, one of two Floridians whom Trump appointed to the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year.

It wouldn’t matter who they have in mind.

There couldn’t be a greater hypocrisy than for McConnell’s Senate to confirm any nominee this president might appoint — not after stealing that Supreme Court seat from Obama just four years ago.

The difference, as some Republicans have been saying, is that Obama was a lame duck nearing the end of his constitutional two terms.

But that is more a distinction than a difference.

Remember what else they said then — that the forthcoming election would be a referendum, in effect, on who should appoint Scalia’s successor.

That is exactly the situation now. Trump might well be — as he deserves to be — a lame duck himself in barely six weeks.

For the Senate to confirm anyone before then would break nomination speed records, even those that were relatively noncontroversial.

For the Senate to confirm any Trump nominee before or after he loses the election would give the Democrats more than enough justification — should they win the White House and the Senate — to retaliate by adding two seats to the court.

“Court packing,” as it’s called, has had a bad name since President Franklin D. Roosevelt took after a Supreme Court that was killing his vital New Deal legislation during the depths of the Great Depression.

But that was a different situation. There was no rush to fill a vacancy before FDR succeeded Herbert Hoover, as he eventually did.

In any case, there is no magic to the number nine. There are more judges on all but one of the 13 circuit courts of appeals. Moreover, the Republicans did pack the court, in effect, by holding the seat open until President Trump could nominate Justice Neil M. Gorsuch.

The rush to replace Ginsburg is not just a staggering hypocrisy. It is also a potential constitutional crisis. Any justice confirmed before the election, or even in the month after, would be in position to decide on challenges to the election. The American public, having put up with so much these past four years, should not have to bear that, too.

Do most Americans want Trump to have that opportunity? The polls say no.

In one respect, Lagoa’s nomination would reek of a political payback. The ink is still wet on the Eleventh Circuit’s 6-4 decision, in which she cast the deciding vote, to keep nearly a million people from voting in Florida this year.

That ruling upheld the new Florida law that requires ex-felons to pay all fines, costs and restitution they owe — regardless of their ability to pay or the state’s ability to tell them what they owe — before registering under the voting rights restoration initiative that nearly two-third of Florida voters approved two years ago.

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Democrats called on Lagoa to sit out that case because she had heard related arguments while sitting on the Florida Supreme Court. She refused. As a result, only wealthy ex-felons may register to vote.

In the developing crisis over the Ginsburg vacancy, two Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, have said the Senate should not confirm a nominee now. It would take only two more to prevent it. Most of the rest, including several who are in danger on Nov. 3, spoke out strongly four years ago for waiting until after the election.

Will Rubio stand by his word?

According to a 17th Century maxim by the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, “Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.”

It was difficult to discern much virtue in what the Republican Senate did in 2016, but there is vice in what they and Trump propose to do now.