Mere hours after last year's death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, while his fellow senators were still penning respectful statements offering their condolences to Justice Scalia's family, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell got right down to business:

The American people‎ should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President.

This statement has no basis in fact. The Constitution vests in the president the power to fill Supreme Court vacancies, and Barack Obama was president at the time of Justice Scalia's death. McConnell's impressively bold argument was that since there might be a new president in a year, the task should fall not to President Obama but to that next person instead.

Although outraged Democratic Senators and pompous-sounding pundits alike stupidly predicted that this strategy would implode in the Republicans' faces, as we know, it very much did not. Now, as President-elect Trump prepares to take office in three weeks, Senator McConnell is starting to sound remarkably like his Democratic colleagues. In response to incoming Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's comments vowing to fight a Trump Supreme Court pick, McConnell had this to say.

Apparently there’s a new standard now, which is to not confirm a Supreme Court nominee at all. I think that’s something the American people simply will not tolerate.

The nerve it must take to say that sentence with a straight face is incredible. But the reason McConnell can get away with spewing such pure, unadulterated drivel is that all the evidence indicates that he's right. Senate Republicans took a huge gamble with their party's future in the way they handled Justice Scalia's replacement, but when Election Day rolled around, it paid off! For the price of a few angry op-eds, the Republican Party took the White House, retained control of both legislative chambers, and earned the right to determine the future of the Court. Since voters indeed elected someone new, just as McConnell and company predicted—I know, 3 million fewer people, but moral victories don't decide the White House—the Senate Majority Leader's breathtaking hypocrisy is really just a grim bit of "told you so" realpolitik.

As Schumer's comments indicate, Democrats might be tempted to stonewall any Trump nominee out of equal parts principle, ideology, and spite. But this time, that strategy might backfire. It's true that Republicans suffered no political consequences for pulling this stunt, but now, half of Senator McConnell's vision has already come to pass: from the jump, he cast the upcoming election as a referendum on future Supreme Court picks, and he got his way. Now, Trump voters still flush with victory will see Democratic efforts to scuttle the victor's nominee as the lame, feeble efforts of sore losers—and more proof that they were right to hand the keys to someone new. To be clear, this is not at all fair. But in Trump's America, even if Democratic Senators are not the first obstructionists, they may turn out to be the ones who pay for it.