This logic is, of course, infuriatingly circular. As his CNN hosts would later point out, the Republican refrain that the Senate never confirms Supreme Court nominees in presidential election years is demonstrably false, so Hatch adds a new prong to his test in an effort to make it smell less like the bullshit that it is: both sides have to agree that a nomination should go forward before the Senate acts. In other words, because Republicans didn't want to give Garland a hearing, it was therefore somehow not an unjustified, politically-motivated act for them to do so.

ANCHOR: Why was it the right thing to do to not even hold an up-or-down vote eight months out from an election? … To not even have the voices of your fellow senators heard on this one? Why was that right for the American people?

HATCH: That’s what democracy is. Democracy says you can hold a vote or you don’t have to hold a vote.

Personally, I would have said that the spirit of democracy is embodied by voting on qualified nominees selected by the lawfully-elected President, not using procedural rules to block substantive votes from even occurring in the first place, but the gigantic plank sticking out of Orrin Hatch's eye right now might be clouding his judgment a bit.

Over on MSNBC, South Carolina's Lindsey Graham didn't fare much better in the persuasion department, calling the filibuster of Gorsuch "the end of bipartisanship on judges." Yes, he asserted that the Democrats are to blame for the tragic death of Senate cooperation on well-qualified judicial nominees, and also, my facial expression is now permanently stuck as a real-life thinking-face emoji.

We'll have a partisan vote on every federal judge, at least at the circuit and Supreme Court level. Reaching across the aisle will be a thing of the past. You’ll get more ideological judges. And it makes every open Senate seat a referendum on the future of the Supreme Court. That’s what happens when you do it within one party.

He continued: