https://www.nbcnews.com/video/schumer-slams-gop-on-scotus-steps-over-garland-delay-701425731900?v=a

.... and then there's this:

https://dailycaller.com/2020/09/18/democrats-supreme-court-vacancy-2016-vacancy-merrick-garland/

Although Democratic p**********l nominee Joe Biden favored putting off a confirmation hearing during an e******n year in 1992 as a senator, Biden supported Garland’s confirmation in 2016 as vice president, according to ABC News. He said there was no supposed “Biden Rule” concerning Supreme Court nominations in an e******n year.

“Deciding in advance simply to turn your back before the president even names a nominee is not an option the Constitution leaves open,” Biden said, according to Business Insider. “It’s a plain abdication from the Senate’s duty. … [It’s] never occurred before in our history.”

“E******ns have consequences,” then-Democratic p**********l nominee Hillary Clinton said, according to Politico. “The president has a responsibility to nominate a new justice and the Senate has a responsibility to v**e."

She called McConnell's decision "outrageous." [Wonder what she'll say this time around.]

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer tweeted: “Garland has integrity, a brilliant legal mind & is a perfect fit for [the Supreme Court]. GOP inaction does our country a great disservice.”

And then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi tweeted: “Judge Merrick Garland, is a respected jurist who must be given a fair hearing & timely v**e.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders, an Independent who caucuses with Democrats, tweeted, “Judge Garland is a strong nominee with decades of experience on the bench. [Obama] has done his job. It’s time for Republicans to do theirs.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Elizabeth Warren tweeted that Republicans must “ditch their extremism” and schedule a v**e for Garland.

Then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said the Senate should consider a nominee immediately, according to Politico.

“It would be unprecedented in recent history for the Supreme Court to go a year with a vacant seat,” Reid said, Politico reported. “Failing to fill this vacancy would be a shameful abdication of one of the Senate’s most essential Constitutional responsibilities.”

This is a long and detailed article written a month and a half before Ginsburg passed away. Good education for those who can read.

History Is on the Side of Republicans Filling a Supreme Court Vacancy in 2020

If a Supreme Court vacancy opens up between now and the end of the year, Republicans should fill it. Given the vital importance of the Court to rank-and-file Republican v**ers and grassroots activists, particularly in the five-decade-long quest to overturn Roe v. Wade, it would be political suicide for Republicans to refrain from filling a vacancy unless some law or important traditional norm was against them. There is no such law and no such norm; those are all on their side. Choosing not to fill a vacancy would be a historically unprecedented act of unilateral disarmament. It has never happened once in all of American history. There is no chance that the Democrats, in the same position, would ever reciprocate, as their own history illustrates.

For now, all this remains hypothetical. Neither Ruth Bader Ginsburg nor any of her colleagues intend to go anywhere. But with the 87-year-old Ginsburg fighting a recurrence of cancer and repeatedly in and out of hospitals, we are starting to see the Washington press corps and senators openly discussing what would happen if she dies or is unable to continue serving on the Court. Democrats are issuing threats, and some Republicans are already balking.

They shouldn’t.

History supports Republicans filling the seat. Doing so would not be in any way inconsistent with Senate Republicans’ holding open the seat vacated by Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. The reason is simple, and was explained by Mitch McConnell at the time. Historically, throughout American history, when their party controls the Senate, presidents get to fill Supreme Court vacancies at any time — even in a p**********l e******n year, even in a lame-duck session after the e******n, even after defeat. Historically, when the opposite party controls the Senate, the Senate gets to block Supreme Court nominees sent up in a p**********l e******n year, and hold the seat open for the winner. Both of those precedents are settled by experience as old as the republic. Republicans should not create a brand-new precedent to deviate from them.

Power, Norms, and E******n-Year Nominations

There are two types of rules in Washington: laws that allocate power, and norms that reflect how power has traditionally, historically been used. Laws that allocate power are paramount, and particularly dangerous to violate, but there is no such law at issue here. A president can always make a nomination for a Supreme Court vacancy, no matter how late in his term or how many times he has been turned down; the only thing in his way is the Senate.

Twenty-nine times in American history there has been an open Supreme Court vacancy in a p**********l e******n year, or in a lame-duck session before the next p**********l inauguration. (This counts vacancies created by new seats on the Court, but not vacancies for which there was a nomination already pending when the year began, such as happened in 1835–36 and 1987–88.) The president made a nomination in all twenty-nine cases. George Washington did it three times. John Adams did it. Thomas Jefferson did it. Abraham Lincoln did it. Ulysses S. Grant did it. Franklin D. Roosevelt did it. Dwight Eisenhower did it. Barack Obama, of course, did it. Twenty-two of the 44 men to hold the office faced this situation, and all twenty-two made the decision to send up a nomination, whether or not they had the v**es in the Senate.

During the 1844 e******n, for example, there were two open seats on the Court. John Tyler made nine separate nominations of five different candidates, in one case sending up the same nominee three times. He sent up a pair of nominees in December, after the e******n. When those failed, he sent up another pair in February (p**********l terms then ended in March). He had that power. Presidents have made Supreme Court nominations as late as literally the last day of their term. In Tyler’s case, the Whig-controlled Senate had, and used, its power to block multiple nominations by a man they had previously expelled from their party.

At the same time, in terms of raw power, a majority of senators has the power to seat any nominee they want, and block any nominee they want. Historically, that power of the majority was limited by the filibuster, but a majority can change that rule, and has. Norms long limited the filibuster’s use in judicial nominations in the first place, and violation of those norms led to its abolition. No Supreme Court nominee was filibustered by a minority of Senators until 1968. Senate Democrats attempted filibusters of William Rehnquist twice, and launched the first formal filibuster of a new appointment to the Court on partisan lines against Samuel Alito in 2005. Joe Biden participated prominently in the Rehnquist and Alito filibusters. Senate Democrats, led by Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer and joined by Biden, were the first to filibuster federal appellate nominees in 2003. After Republicans adopted the same tactic years later, Senate Democrats eliminated the filibuster for appellate nominees in 2013. Republicans extended that elimination to Supreme Court nominees in 2017.

So, today, Donald Trump has the raw power to make a Supreme Court nomination all the way to the end of his term. Senate Republicans have the raw power to confirm one at least until a new Senate is seated on January 3, and — so long as there are at least 50 Republican senators on that date — until Trump leaves office. Whether they should use this power, however, is a matter of norms, and of politics.

Norms are crucially important. If parties cannot trust that the other side will abide by established norms of conduct, politics devolves rapidly into a blood sport that quickly loses the capacity to resolve disagreements peaceably within the system. Those norms are derived from tradition and history. So let’s look at the history.

The Senate’s Precedents

In 2016, Barack Obama used his raw power to nominate Merrick Garland to replace Antonin Scalia in March of the last year of Obama’s term, with the Trump–Clinton e******n underway. The Republican majority in the Senate used its raw power to refuse to seat that nominee. Having reached that decision, the Republican majority did not even hold a hearing for an outcome that was predetermined. In looking back at that exercise of Senate power in 2017, I concluded that it was supported by historical precedent:

In short: There have been ten vacancies resulting in a p**********l e******n-year or post-e******n nomination when the president and Senate were from opposite parties. In six of the ten cases, a nomination was made before E******n Day. Only one of those, Chief Justice Melville Fuller’s nomination by Grover Cleveland in 1888, was confirmed before the e******n. Four nominations were made in lame-duck sessions after the e******n; three of those were left open for the winner of the e******n. Other than the unusual Fuller nomination (made when the Court was facing a crisis of backlogs in its docket), three of the other nine were filled after E******n Day in ways that rewarded the winner of the p**********l contest:

In February 1845, the Whigs (who had lost the Senate and the White House in the 1844 e******n) c*********d in the lame-duck session to seat one of Tyler’s nominees, leaving the other for incoming Democrat James K. Polk.
In December 1880 and January 1881, the Democrats (who had likewise lost the Senate and failed to regain the White House in 1880) confirmed one of Rutherford B. Hayes’s nominees and defeated the other, who was then successfully renominated by Hayes’s Republican successor, James A. Garfield.
In 1956, Dwight Eisenhower’s pre-e******n recess appointment of a Democrat, William Brennan, in mid-October was confirmed as a lifetime appointment in Ike’s second term after he was reelected and the Democrats continued to hold the Senate.

The norm in these cases strongly favored holding the seat open for the conflict between the two branches to be resolved by the p**********l e******n. That is what Republicans did in 2016. The v**ers had created divided government, and the Senate was within its historical rights to insist on an intervening e******n to decide the power struggle. Had there been no conflict between the branches to submit to the v**ers for resolution, there would have been no reason for delay.

When Anthony Kennedy retired in 2018, I looked again at the historical practice, and concluded that the norm in midterm-e******n years favors confirming a Supreme Court nominee regardless of which party holds the Senate. This, too, has become the norm for a reason: While the Senate can always reject a particularly objectionable nominee, it is hard to justify forcing the Court to work short-handed for years on end.

So what does history say about this situation, where a president is in his last year in office, his party controls the Senate, and the branches are not in conflict? Once again, historical practice and tradition provides a clear and definitive answer: In the absence of divided government, e******n-year nominees get confirmed.

You can read the rest of this and view the charts at the link.