The political scientist Jonathan Bernstein, writing at the New Republic site last week, made a point about the Senate and Supreme Court nominations that hadn't occurred to me and caught me in my tracks:

Meanwhile, the real question here is what will happen in 2011-2012. As I said, five Republican Senators -- Collins, Graham, Lugar, Snowe, and the retiring Judd Gregg -- defected [voting for Elena Kagan]; Ben Nelson also defected [voting against], but said he would vote for cloture. The obvious question is: what would have happened if there were only 52 or 53 Democrats in the Senate, or for that matter 48 or 49. Elena Kagan appears, by all accounts, to be a mainstream Democratic nominee; she certainly wasn't on the short list of liberal advocates, although she was broadly acceptable to most of them. Can any Obama nominee be confirmed to the Supreme Court next year? The problem here is that compromise is almost impossible to imagine over the Court. Does anyone believe that Thune, DeMint, and the other Senators who may be running for president next year could accept any nominee from Barack Obama? And, after Bob Bennett and the rest of the primaries this year, does anyone believe that more than a handful of Republicans will stand up to the threat of a primary? I don't really expect a full-blown train wreck over the budget, or over any must-pass legislation next year, no matter how well the GOP does in November. But if there's a Supreme Court opening, and if the Democrats hold fewer than, say, 55 seats in the Senate, I think the odds of a real train wreck, a total stalemate, have to be well over 50/50. And, again, if the Democrats fall below 55 Senators, I'll be surprised if the Senate manages to confirm very many Appeals Court nominees.

In other words, imagine, say, the cancer-stricken Ruth Bader Ginsburg retiring. Or more urgently, imagine (not that one wishes it obviously) an untimely and unexpected departure by one of the court's conservatives. And imagine the Democrats with 54 senators next year.

A Supreme Court nomination is like all other major Senate business. It needs two votes, 60 to end debate and 51 to pass. Bernstein is saying, and I think he's right, that there is almost no way under the above circumstances that the Senate would let any Obama high court nominee through. We'd have a court with eight members. Maybe that would finally open people's eyes to what's been going on in the Senate, although I've quit holding out hope about such things.

What happened at the end of last week, with the blocking of Peter Diamond's nomination to the board of governors of the Federal Reserve Bank, was bad enough. Diamond is an incredibly accomplished economist with qualifications way beyond doubt. So what was the problem? I agree with Steve Benen:

So, what's this all about? It's worth considering the possibility that congressional Republicans, not content with blocking legislation that might improve the economy, also want to prevent the Federal Reserve from exercising its powers and pumping more capital into the economy. Jonathan Cohn's take, explaining what President Obama's nominees may do if confirmed to the Fed, is worth reading: One of his nominees, Janet Yellen, has said publicly that the Fed has an obligation to focus more on employment during times like these. And while I don't know whether Diamond has said similar things, I know enough about his philosophical bearings to know -- or, at least, suspect strongly -- that he'd push for more employment-focused policies, as well. As Paul Krugman notes today, Diamond wrote the seminal paper on structural shifts in unemployment. In other words, Obama's nominees may very well use the power of the Fed to improve the American economy -- so Shelby is slowing the process down, on purpose, and making the White House needlessly jump through procedural hoops without a coherent explanation.

I grant that you'll never get a majority of Americans to accept that one of our two political parties could be so morally corrupt that it would block actions aimed at helping the country out of its worst economic crisis in 75 years for the sake of electoral gains. But that is what appears to be happening.

The point we have reached in this country: today's conservative movement and GOP simply will not let a Democratic administration govern. The very idea of a Democratic administration is illegitimate to this movement. Extremists like Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Bachmann and Jim DeMint will disrupt its functioning by hook or by crook, and previously reasonable conservative solons like Orrin Hatch and Chuck Grassley don't have the spine to stand up to it and just go along.

Anything vaguely liberal - more accurately, anything not avowedly conservative - must be blocked by any means necessary. They're the Malcolm X Republicans.

