With no explanation, label the following with either "hyperpartisan" or "not_hyperpartisan".
This article is part of the Opinion Today newsletter. You can sign up here to receive more briefings and a guide to the section daily in your inbox. Republicans are starting to talk openly about refusing to fill Antonin Scalia’s Supreme Court seat not only through the end of President Obama’s term but indefinitely. Ted Cruz, Charles Grassley and John McCain have all sent such signals, as have some other prominent conservatives. It’s worth taking this talk seriously. Too many top Republicans have made clear in recent years that they care more about winning than about adhering to political norms or doing what’s best for the country. You can see this attitude in the willingness to shut down the government, the threats to default on the national debt and the stated desire to make Obama a failed president. The political scientists Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein call it “ asymmetric polarization”: the two political parties have come to behave quite differently. Refusing to seat a ninth justice, simply for ideological reasons, would be a clear and worrisome break with democratic tradition. It would send the message that Republicans believe a president should be able to exercise the Constitutional power to name justices only if that president were Republican. It would represent a new level of partisan cynicism. I hope that the wiser heads within the Republican Party prevail after the election. But Democrats should be prepared for the alternative. The alternative would mean that Senate control — which remains up in the air, given the tightness of recent polls — will be crucial. If Republicans hold the Senate, a President Hillary Clinton would be at their mercy with any nominee. If Democrats take the Senate, they would have an obvious fallback plan: eliminating the 60-vote threshold of the filibuster — as a Senate majority can always do — and confirming a justice with 51 votes. As long as Republicans keep talking about permanent obstructionism, Democrats should not hesitate to use that option. What I’m reading: Jeff Shesol, at The New Yorker, has an excellent breakdown of the growing signs of the Republicans’ Supreme Court obstructionism.
hyperpartisan.