Mitch McConnell was asked last week what his position would be with regard to filling a vacant Supreme Court seat, if one of the justices were “to die next year” during the rolling boil of the presidential campaign.

The Senate Majority Leader was under no obligation to answer the question – it was raised during a Peducah (Ky.) Chamber of Commerce luncheon, which is not where national news often happens, and he might have pointed out that using a death to broadcast your political intentions is not keeping with the protocol of a statesman.

But McConnell is not so much a statesman as he is a ward-heeler in the House of Trump, and he practices a level of political depravity that would impress the Borgias.

So the answer was automatic: “Oh, we’d fill it,” he replied, grinning wider as the laughter grew louder.

It’s not surprising that McConnell could turn a death into a laugh line, especially since it would likely help him achieve his political aims.

And it’s not surprising that McConnell’s audience would enjoy such a brazen show of hypocrisy, given the discourtesy he showed a Democratic president when a seat became vacant during the 2016 campaign.

But it does mark another rotation in the death spiral of the republic, a reminder of the assessment historian Christopher Browning made last year, when he said, “If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the grave digger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell.”

His argument was that McConnell has fueled American polarization, largely with a supremely cynical ideology: embrace a system of anonymous plutocrats pouring piles of cash into elections, elect Republican majorities in gerrymandered districts, push through hundreds of unelected judges, and protect the hegemony of a shrinking party inside a corrupt fortress that cannot be breached by democratic will.

His signature moment was Feb. 13, 2016, hours after Justice Antonin Scalia died, when McConnell tweeted that the seat must not be filled by President Obama “in the middle of a contested presidential election.”

With 10 months left in his term, Obama nominated an ideological moderate, appellate judge Merrick Garland. But for the first time in US history, the GOP-controlled Senate refused to even consider a president’s nominee for the high court.

It was an open violation of a constitutional norm, and McConnell’s stonewall held.

Though he could not be certain of it at the time, it was done in service of another serial norm-breaker — Donald Trump, whose own nominee, arch conservative Neil Gorsuch, was confirmed on party lines. It wasn’t the first time the court had been transformed into a nakedly political institution, but the consequences could last decades.

McConnell claimed he was being “entirely consistent with what the history of the Senate’s been in that situation going back to 1880.” He made that part up: There have been seven election-year confirmations since the start of the 20th century. Most recently, Justice Anthony Kennedy was confirmed in a 97-0 landslide after being nominated by President Reagan in 1988, and that was by a Democratic-controlled Senate.

So it’s no surprise that smirking Senate leader has decided the change the playbook, because he governs by one rule: If the end doesn’t justify the means, what does?

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