Her confirmation as Attorney General shouldn’t have been a stretch. Photograph by Mark Wilson / Getty

“Who do you think President Obama could appoint at this very day, given the boundaries that we have?” Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in Elle last fall, after being asked yet again if she would consider retiring from the Supreme Court. “If I resign any time this year, he could not successfully appoint anyone I would like to see in the court.” Plenty of people said that Ginsburg was wrong. Things were bad, but not that bad. Republicans knew that they’d have to confirm someone from the universe of people that Obama would be willing to nominate—that is, someone more or less like Ginsburg, not Antonin Scalia.

The Senate’s treatment of Loretta Lynch, Obama's nominee for Attorney General, suggests, though, that Ginsburg may have actually underestimated the pathology at work. On November 8, 2014, the President sent her name to the Senate as a replacement for Eric Holder, and she has yet to be confirmed—the Republican leadership has simply failed to put her nomination up for a vote by the full Senate. Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, made vague, wiggly gestures about getting it done this week, but he didn’t, and unless something remarkable happens over the weekend his next opportunity will be three weeks from now. The Senate is talking about the budget next week, and will take all its time to pretend that it is making a serious effort to do something about the nation’s finances; after that comes one of those mysterious two-week congressional recesses.

Lynch’s confirmation shouldn’t have been a stretch. She has spent years as a prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York, and her relations with the law-enforcement community are excellent—so excellent that on Friday Rudy Giuliani, of all people, was raging about the need to confirm her. (He called her not only qualified but “over-qualified” for the job.) She seems to be more conservative than Holder. She is the daughter of a minister and a librarian, and it appears, from her many confirmation hearings, that she has a reputation for probity. She has undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard. During her confirmation hearings, her sister members of Delta Sigma Theta sat in the audience, wearing the sorority’s signature red. It took until February to get her name through the judiciary committee, but she made it, with a 12-8 vote. At the moment, various reports suggest that she will be confirmed narrowly, with the votes of the forty-six Democratic senators, four Republicans (Jeff Flake, Orrin Hatch, Lindsey Graham, and Susan Collins), and Vice President Joe Biden, who would cast the tie-breaking vote. This is what it looks like when Obama proposes a nominee for a place in his own cabinet, who won’t be on the job any longer than he is, and who is a picture of moderation. What would it look like if he went for a radical choice—or even an outspoken liberal like Ruth Bader Ginsburg?

Indeed, what if this were a Supreme Court nomination? Would the Senate act senatorial? Elena Kagan was confirmed in 2010, but Washington has only descended since then. With just a year and a half until the 2016 election, the G.O.P. might be up for any kind of fight.

The four months since Lynch’s nomination is not a normal interval. Ed Meese had a longer lag before his confirmation, in 1985, counting various stops and starts, but what held him up was a need to complete a couple of ethics investigations. (And there may have been more to find: another ethics problem led to Meese’s resignation before the end of Reagan’s second term.) According to FiveThirtyEight there have been only a couple of nominees in the past four decades who’ve had to wait as long. (One of them was Gina McCarthy, now the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, in 2013.) The ostensible delay this week was because the Democrats noticed that the Republicans had slipped a passage into an anti-human-trafficking bill stating that, if victims got money from a compensation fund, they couldn’t use it to terminate a pregnancy. That has nothing to do with Lynch, or with anything that she might be asked to adjudicate as Attorney General; but, when the Democrats asked for a change, the Republicans said that they couldn’t have one—or a vote on Lynch until the bill went through unchanged. Before that, it was immigration: Lynch wouldn’t tell the Senate that the President had run roughshod over the Constitution by deferring the deportation of so-called DREAMers—young people who had been brought to America illegally as children and built lives here—and the President wouldn’t revoke that order to get her a vote. On Thursday, The Hill reported that the gun lobby was mobilizing against Lynch. The National Rifle Association sent out an alert, talking about “the damage an Obama-appointed, agenda-driven, anti-gun Attorney General can do to our rights and freedoms as Americans.” Dudley Brown, the president of the National Association for Gun Rights, told The Hill, “Given her close personal and professional ties to this lawless administration, gun owners fully expect her to be Eric Holder 2.0.”

The vehemence of some of the opposition to Lynch, unmoored from anything about her record or her résumé, raises the question of who her opponents see when they look at her. (“Eric Holder in a skirt,” a draft letter from the Gun Owners of America, obtained by The Hill, said.) Senator Dick Durbin, of Illinois, said Wednesday, “Loretta Lynch, the first African-American woman nominated to be Attorney General, is asked to sit in the back of the bus when it comes to the Senate calendar. That is unfair. It’s unjust.” Senator John McCain replied that Durbin’s remark was “beneath the decorum of the United States Senate,” and “serves no purpose but to further divide us.” Some commentators who are supportive of Lynch worried that Durbin was being tactically unwise. And focussing on Lynch’s race assumes that the Republicans would have let a white nominee with her qualifications breeze through—as though, if only the President had made them feel a bit more comfortable, everything would have been fine. It is no compliment to them to say that they are so frenzied in their obstructionism that they might, indeed, have stalled then, too. On Friday, Eric Holder said on MSNBC that “My guess is that there is probably not a huge racial component to this, that this is really just D.C. politics, Washington at its worst.” He recognized his own odd position—though hated by Republicans, he is still on the job because of their stubbornness, and may be for a while. It was, Holder said, “a little strange.”​