I'm not sure this is really as relevant a question as whether an opposition senate has ever blocked a Supreme Court nominee in an election year. I don't have the answer to that, but it appears the last time a Democratic president made a Supreme Court appointment while Republicans held the Senate was in 1895, whereas the last time the reverse happened was 1987. So while we may not be able to say "the Democrats clearly wouldn't have done the same thing McConnell did" with surety, I don't think we can say that they clearly would have, either.
Yes, i know. Neither was 1895. That was kind of my point. Let me try to frame this a hopefully better way.
People keep trying to argue that McConnell isn't being a hypocrite, he's just following precedent. But for that to be true, we need to (a) find a time before 2016 when the Senate prevented a Supreme Court nominee from even getting a vote on the Senate floor in an election year, and (b) the Senate needs to specifically cite the upcoming election as a reason. So far, no one seems to be able to point to that supposedly precedent-setting case. And that's before we throw in McConnell's new claim as of yesterday that such a precedent only applies when the Senate majority and the President are from two different parties, a condition which, it's worth noting, was never mentioned by him or any of his supporters in 2016.
In strictly legal terms, McConnell gets to do what he wants. But the claim that he was following some previously established norm by denying Garland a vote in 2016 but not denying a new nominee a vote in 2020 is simply a lie.
It absolutely was mentioned by many people in 2016 (including McConnell himself, if you read his statements and realize he wasn’t spelling it out word for word because the majority aspect was blindingly obvious, and if I recall he may have even clarified that part too).
I read about it extensively at the time from many on the right, and the left - that was the entire grounds for it happening. That McConnel himself may not have explicitly called out the Senate majority in his prominent press interviews was because it was totally obvious to anyone even remotely familiar with politics why, and therefore why beyond saying “it’s an electron year” would he need to keep clarifying? He just wasn’t assuming the insane amount of bad faith everyone would give him, incl. people like yourself.
So no, you don’t have some subtle understanding that no one else besides you and “your side” is getting at all.
Again, let me reiterate, because it seems you’re really trying to find something here: it was discussed on the right extensively, explicitly mentioning the Senate majority factor at the time, in 2016, and was generally well understood on the right. In fact the rights news writers were sort of flabbergasted and writing about how it’s being propagandized to look super bad when in fact it was not. I can’t even believe you’re trying to argue that wasn’t the case - talk about a straw-man.
Avoiding the vote altogether as opposed to having it and rejecting it was indeed unique, but not hypocritical. Simply put, he had the power to do that as the majority in the Senate. You can be upset about it, but I suspect you’re really just upset because your side lost or you have some gut revulsion towards McConnel, not because it was some grand betrayal - because it didn’t change a single thing in terms of outcomes, not even in terms of slippery slopes. The Democrats are totally free to do the same the next time this situation comes up, and they will and are expected to, and that too wouldn’t change a thing, and I’m sure some idiot Republicans will whine about it as well...that’s politics.
