If they’d wanted, though, Republicans could find a newer and more relevant example of a senior constitutional official unilaterally expanding an undoubted constitutional right into a bold new claim of power. That example is President Obama’s two 2014 immigration orders, suspending all enforcement action against millions of illegal aliens—and unilaterally extending to them rights of residency and work in the United States.

Their premise? That the president has discretion to decide which illegal immigrants to act against, and in which order.

It follows that the president has discretion to decide not to act against entire classes and categories of illegal immigrants—and, more than that, to inform them so in advance, along with potential employers, landlords, and so on.

The structure of that claim is exactly parallel to that advanced by McConnell.

Premise: The Senate has discretion not to schedule hearings or votes on any particular judicial nominee.

Conclusion: The Senate can properly announce in advance that it will refuse to schedule hearings or votes on all judicial nominees.

If anything, McConnell’s claim seems far more logical and less anti-constitutional than the former.

Yet extending the so-called Thurmond rule to the full year before an election is unprecedented—and also, by the way, very dangerous, for the country and for Republicans. By assuring Obama that he need not worry that a nominee will actually serve on the Court, McConnell empowered and invited the president to play radical politics with the nomination. The big concern Democrats have (or should have) about 2016 is the decline in turnout that occurred between 2008 and 2012. Obama’s support dropped by 3.6 million votes between his election and his re-election. The Republican ticket gained only 900,000 votes over the same four years. Absenteeism was most marked among younger voters and Latinos.

What saved Obama was the loyalty and commitment of African Americans: their participation actually increased between 2008 and 2012—and it was their ballots that provided the president with his margin of victory. If they should feel uninspired in 2016, the Democratic nominee is likely doomed. Democrats will want to do everything they can to rev up African American excitement and energy.

Such as for example, nominating somebody like Eric Holder, who might welcome his nomination with a fiery statement about voting rights, affirmative action, and Black Lives Matter. Republicans would of course go wild, denying him a hearing … and Democrats would gain a bloody shirt to wave in November. Emancipated from worrying about the best candidate for the bench, they could instead use the nomination to elect their candidate to the Oval Office.

Maybe the president won’t go quite so far as that. Maybe he’ll dial down the provocation slightly. But the possibility exists, and the lesson of the past seven years is that the restraints against provocative behavior—by either party—have become more feeble, when they are not shredded outright.