The death of Justice Antonin Scalia has triggered an endurance test, the political version of a dance marathon, where we discover just how long the Republican-controlled Senate can leave a Supreme Court vacancy open. It took all of an hour for Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to vow to not replace Scalia for the remainder of President Barack Obama’s term. This throws the current and possibly future Supreme Court sessions into ineffectual chaos, leaving in place markedly different interpretations of the law in different appellate court districts.

But the Scalia appointment is only the latest measure in which congressional Republicans have written the president out of the government. Obama has filled only one vacancy at the appellate court level since the Republicans took over the Senate at the beginning of 2015. Earlier this month, McConnell effectively shut down the legislature for the year, arguing against moving forward on bills even if they have bipartisan support. Republicans on the Budget Committee neglected to hold hearings on the president’s final budget for the first time in the history of the modern budget process.

Not only is there no precedent for keeping a Supreme Court seat open in an election year; there’s no precedent for any of these examples, which basically rob the president of the fourth year of his term. The treatment of Obama is an historical outlier. Obviously, increased polarization and the failures of the constitutional system accounts for some of this, but I think there’s something else at work: the multi-year spectacle that has become our presidential campaigns.

We don’t just have races for the presidency anymore. We have made-for-TV serial programming, with months of debates, primary-night extravaganzas, even special shows created just for primary season. The inclusion of a reality TV star into the proceedings reinforces this, but even without Donald Trump the public image of the primary process resembles a two-year season of Survivor. And people are responding similarly: Ratings for debates have been higher than ever before.

Since the wide adoption of the primary process, we’ve always had Iowa and New Hampshire voting in the depths of winter, around the same time as this year’s edition. But the attention paid prior to voting has gone around the bend. Bill Clinton announced his candidacy for the 1992 race on October 3, 1991, just four months before Iowa. Even in 2000, John McCain didn’t announce until late September 1999. The campaign was not a two-year pageant until quite recently.