Who’s Afraid of Merrick Garland?

There was a brief moment, this weekend, when Governor John Kasich exhibited what passes today for reason in the Republican Party. He wasn’t entirely sensible: asked about Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, he told Chuck Todd, on “Meet the Press,” “I never thought the President should have sent it up”—adopting the position that, somehow, Obama, twice elected and with a year left in his term, had shown unwarranted audacity by doing his job. On “Face the Nation,” Kasich told John Dickerson the same thing, in the same words, adding, “Whoever gets elected President should be in a position to be able to pick who they want.” He meant the 2016 election; 2012 doesn’t count. Still, he did say that the Republican senators “probably ought to all sit down and meet with the guy,” something almost all of them have refused to do. When Dickerson asked if a President Kasich would consider Garland, he said, “Of course we’d think about it.” He also told Todd that the senators should show respect by giving Garland a meeting, and that, in a Kasich Presidency, “maybe he’ll be under consideration for the Supreme Court. I don’t know.”