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While Republicans’ claims that their refusal to consider President Obama’s Supreme Court nomination is somehow based on “tradition” have been extensively debunked, I have not seen anyone place this Republican intransigence in true perspective and context. Not only did a Democratic Senate confirm Justice Anthony Kennedy during Reagan’s final year, but Democrats did so in the midst of the Iran-Contra scandal and Senate hearings — an investigation that ultimately led to the indictment of 14 Reagan staffers and 11 convictions, and included consideration of whether President Reagan should be impeached.

That is the true precedent for today’s debate.

For those to young to remember, the Iran-Contra Scandal involved an illegal scheme by the Reagan administration to secretly sell arms to Iran (in violation of an arms embargo) in an effort to ransom the release of several U.S. hostages, and to use the proceeds connected from such unlawful arms sales to illegally and secretly fund the “Contra” militias in Nicaragua. This “arms-for-hostages” deal with a terrorist state, and the funding of a covert illegal war, led to serious talk of whether President Reagan should be impeached and removed from office.

In the March 4, 1987 video above, President Reagan confessed to, and took responsibility for, (some of) his administration’s illegal conduct in the Iran-Contra Scandal.

But notice that in the middle of the Joint Congressional Iran-Contra Hearings, held between May through August 1987, President Reagan, on July 1, 1987, nominated Robert Bork as a Supreme Court Justice to replace Justice Lewis Powell. In the midst of this potential Constitutional crisis, the Democratic Senate nonetheless held extensive hearings on the Bork nomination, ultimately rejecting his nomination in a bipartisan vote.

Eventually, on November 11, 1987, President Reagan nominated Anthony Kennedy. One week later, on November 18, 1987, the U.S. Senate released its “Iran-Contra Investigation Report,” detailing extensive law breaking at the highest levels of the Reagan administration.

Notwithstanding this state of affairs, the Senate (again) held confirmation hearings on Mr. Kennedy’s nomination within a month (December 14-16, 1987) and confirmed Mr. Kennedy as a Supreme Court Justice on February 3, 1988.

Within two years, almost to the day (Feb. 16, 1990), former President Reagan was required to testify as a witness in the criminal trial resulting from the Iran-Contra Scandal:

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So yes, Justice Kennedy’s appointment alone demonstrates that the latest Republican misbehavior and obstructionism lacks any justification, historical or otherwise. But it borders on the surreal and clinical that we can have this public discussion while ignoring that President Reagan was able to nominate, and have confirmed, a Supreme Court Justice in his final year while at the same time he and his administration were under Congressional and criminal investigations for one of the most egregious presidential scandals in U.S. history. (I swear that today’s press views its role as similar to a NYC cop at a crime scene: “OK, nothing to see here . . . let’s move along . . .”)

If Chuck Todd and the rest of the Belt Way press really are struggling with whether to report this latest Republican misbehavior with President Obama as a scandal, or are trying to find some false-equivalency, I suggest that they ask only one question:

Q. When was the last time that a President, under Congressional and criminal investigations for secretly selling arms to terrorists as a ransom for hostages, while funding a covert, illegal war, was nonetheless allowed to have his Supreme Court nominee confirmed by the opposition party in the last year of his presidency?

A. The last time that a White Republican President tried to do it.