WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — By trying to shut down all three branches of government, the Republicans in the U.S. Senate have finally gone too far in their war against President Barack Obama.

In my opinion, the Republicans are going to regret their blanket refusal to consider anyone that Obama nominates for the vacancy on the Supreme Court that was left by the death of conservative Antonin Scalia.

Why? Because, in addition to it being terrible public policy, obstructing Obama in this way is bad politics. Making the Supreme Court a big election issue is likely to motivate more liberals than conservatives.

As a resident of the District of Columbia, I have a special perspective on this: None of the clowns in the U.S. Senate represent me, and I don’t have to defend the behavior of any of the clowns the rest of you inflicted on my fair city.

“ What’s incredible about this battle over the Supreme Court is how utterly pointless it is. ”

Everyone knows the Senate is broken, and has been broken for years. And everyone knows that Senate Leader Mitch McConnell has taken the clownishness to new heights with his argument that Obama isn’t really the president for the last year of his term, which I suppose means that the executive branch of government should just turn off the lights until next January.

When McConnell says “let the people decide,” he’s ignoring the fact that the people already decided, and they elected Obama.

Of course, McConnell has never accepted the election(s) of Obama as president. That’s why McConnell’s Senate has blocked dozens of appointments to administration and judicial positions. This didn’t start last week. There are now 89 vacancies on the federal courts, including 31 deemed by the courts to be an “emergency” vacancy that is delaying justice for the American people.

Dozens of vacancies have no nominee at all because Republican senators in those states refuse to agree to anyone to recommend to Obama. By tradition, federal district court judges are in effect chosen by their home-state senators, and Republicans have been refusing to do even that. Which means, I suppose, that the judicial branch should also turn off the lights until a Republican is elected president.

Yes, Democrats have also acted like clowns at times when the shoe was on the other foot. But at the end of the day, the nominations of Republican presidents were at least considered by the Democrats in charge of the Senate.

I don’t care who started this childish fight about court nominations. When you have a couple of two-year-olds arguing that “He started it!” “No, HE did!” — there’s only one thing to do: Take away the toys from both of the toddlers and have them sit in the corner until the tantrum is over.

Spare me your YouTube gotcha videos from a decade or two ago of Sen. Chuck Schumer, or Sen. Joe Biden, or Sen. Barack Obama saying something vaguely sinister about blocking court nominations they didn’t like.

What’s incredible about this battle over the Supreme Court is how utterly pointless it is. The Constitution provides a ready remedy for Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Republicans if they don’t like Obama’s pick to succeed Scalia: Simply vote “no.”

Article II provides that the president “shall” nominate judges of the Supreme Court, and it gives the Senate the responsibility to give its advice and consent. The duty of the Senate seems clear: Fully vet every nomination the president sends and quickly come to a decision: Yes or no.

In other words, just do your damn job.

Contrast what the Constitution requires with what Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said defending his decision to refuse to even hold hearings on a potential nominee. “I don’t care if I ever go down in history,” he told a reporter who suggested he might be the most obstructionist lawmaker ever. “I’m here to do my job.”

Your job is to refuse to do your job, senator? And you get paid how much?

I believe this will end badly for the Republicans, because they are making the Supreme Court (and their own bullying behavior) a major issue in the presidential election in the fall.

You might think that’s a good thing for Republicans. It’s certainly something the core base of the Republican Party hears all the time when Ted Cruz talks about protecting the “District of Columbia v. Heller” ruling on gun rights.

But Republicans need to be careful: The Supreme Court is something of a dog-whistle; it’s an issue that only conservatives really pay attention to. Liberals, for the most part, don’t put the judiciary near the top of their priorities.

According to a recent Rasmussen poll, about 50% of Democrats think the court is doing a good job, compared with just 34% of Republicans.

But if you tell them over and over that the election is really about the Supreme Court, you’re going to motivate liberals and progressives to vote to preserve the rulings they agree with, rulings that are generally quite popular with the American people, such as the “Roe v. Wade”decision on abortion, the “Obergefell v. Hodges” ruling on gay marriage, and the ruling on Obamacare.

What’s more, it’s not just Scalia’s seat that’s going to be politicized. The next president (along with the next Senate) could reshape the Supreme Court.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote, will be 80 on Inauguration Day. Reliable liberals Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who will be 83) and Stephen Breyer (who will be 78) are getting up there in age. Conservatives Clarence Thomas will be 68, and Samuel Alito will be 66.

It’s a fair bet that several, perhaps a majority, of the nine justices will die or retire between now and 2020.

Sometime after the presidential nominees are chosen, the Republicans will look at the poll numbers and decide they don’t really want to motivate all those disillusioned Bernie Sanders supporters to get passionate about Hillary Clinton, or about the Senate election in their state. They’ll look for a way out of this corner they’ve painted themselves in.

Here’s an unlikely scenario: McConnell will agree to recess the Senate and give Obama the opportunity to fill the Supreme Court vacancy as a recess appointment (Republican President Dwight Eisenhower did this three times, including once just three weeks before Election Day). Obama would appoint whomever he wanted, but that justice would serve only until the end of 2017, when the next president would either renominate Obama’s pick or choose someone else.

At the same time, Obama would fill all the other 89 vacancies on the courts with temporary judges.

If that happened, the Senate still wouldn’t be doing its job, but the rest of the government at least — the president and the federal courts — could do theirs.

As long as I’m dreaming, I have one final wish: that the voters in the 50 states would refuse to send any more clowns to my fair city.