The news is full of stories about the Republican leader of the U.S. Senate who's keeping a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court open until a new president takes office next year.

But Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's a piker compared to the Democratic leader of the New Jersey Senate.

Senate President Steve Sweeney has kept a seat on the New Jersey Supreme Court open for almost six years now.

And when I called Sweeney the other day, he told me he's determined to keep the seat open until the next governor takes office in 2018.

Now that's some stonewalling.

The fight goes back to Gov. Chris Christie's first year in office. During the campaign, Christie had promised conservatives that he would remake the seven-member state Supreme Court by filling the four vacancies that arose during his first four years in office.

The first opportunity occurred when Sweeney's fellow Gloucester County Democrat, Justice John Wallace, came up for renomination at the end of his first seven years in office.

When that seat came up in May of 2010, Christie announced he would replace Wallace with a Republican. That broke with tradition but was his right under the constitution.

The move outraged Sweeney to the point that he pledged not to hold a hearing for Wallace's replacement until the time when Wallace would have reached the mandatory retirement age of 70.

That was 22 months - exactly twice as long as the national Republicans say they'll stonewall President Obama's nominee to the vacancy caused by the death last week of conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

But that was just the beginning of a grudge match that makes the current till in D.C. look like a bout of slap-boxing.

Sweeney permitted Christie's initial nominee, Anne Patterson, to be confirmed after a different seat came open. But by 2012 the original Wallace seat and another were vacant.

Christie put up two nominees. Sweeney managed to get both killed in committee. Christie threw up two more. Remember David Bauman and Robert Hanna? Neither does anyone else. They never even got hearings.

There was a bit of a compromise in 2014 when Christie agreed to renominate Chief Justice Stuart Rabner, a liberal Democrat put on the court by Jon Corzine.

Sweeney agreed to let Christie put Republican stalwart Lee Solomon in one of the other open seats.

But one seat remained open. And when I called Sweeney, he told me he intends to keep the seat open till the end of Christie's term.

"I made it clear when we did Rabner and Solomon that I wasn't going to fill the last seat," Sweeney said. "I'm owning up to it."

I asked Sweeney if he was willing to grant a nominee a hearing at any time.

"No," he replied. "We like it the way it is now. New Jersey is a moderate state and we weren't going to give him an ultraconservative court."

That settles that. Sweeney's not a lawyer. He's an ironworker who used to negotiate for his union.

As such, he knows his rights, and it's his right under the state constitution to keep that seat open until the governor has a name that sounds more like "Sweeney" than "Christie."

But according to the guy who runs the loyal opposition, that sets "a horrific precedent."

"This was supposed to be a governor who had six years with the ability to put qualified people on the bench," Senate Minority Leader Tom Kean Jr. told me. "It's unprecedented that an individual has done this for almost the entirety of an eight-year year term of the executive branch."

Christie hasn't submitted a new nomination for the seat. His office didn't return my call for comment on why he hasn't and if or when that might occur.

State Sen. Mike Doherty, a Republican from Warren County who serves on the Judiciary Committee, said Christie should use the current controversy inWashington to highlight Sweeney's stonewalling.

"I think the governor should call the Democrats' bluff right now and make a Supreme Court nomination," Doherty said. "The Democrats are howling that McConnell should put up a supreme court nomination. Christie has a golden opportunity to pivot off the Democrats' outrage right now."

Perhaps. But the real problem on both the state and federal levels is not easily solved.

The courts have taken so much power upon themselves in recent years that no legislator who is faithful to his constituents' interests would permit the seating of a justice who seems opposed to those interests.

So let us not pretend there is some great principle at stake here. This is politics, pure and simple.

And at the moment, Sweeney is offering a superb example of how to play it.

McConnell should take notes.