Y'know, I'm just not going to bother with you anymore.  No reason to waste mental energy on a person who is threatening me.

I posted Kavanaugh's remarks because the context makes it obvious Kavanaugh was not threatening anyone in the first place.  He was bemoaning the nomination process itself and the personal destruction that Democrats routinely employ stating that the lack of civility will surely be employed against Democrat nominees in the future.  He condemns the process as it will make people hesitant to serve and says that he fears for the future because of it.  He then goes on to reaffirm that he will be a fair and independent judge.

The only way to find a threat in there is to take the single sentence out of context from the whole message.

For the record, I don't agree with Kavanaugh's conclusion that Republicans will use these levels of smear tactics in the future.  If they have the power and desire to stop someone, they'll just do it like they did with Garland.  No need to destroy the man, just don't vote for him.  At worst, point to some controversial writings or opinions as justification (which is fair game).  If they don't have the power or it's early in a presidential term, the person just slides on through, probably with Lindsey Graham's vote.  Graham's taking over the judiciary committee probably benefits future Democrat nominees if any happen while he's still there.  Graham has long been a stickler about treating nominees fairly and prides himself on having voted for Kagan and Sotomayor.  That's actually the reason he was so angry during the Kavanaugh hearings.  Until a couple months ago, he was mostly known as McCain's disciple.  The lack of decorum offended him.  At the least, it's hard to see Republicans engaging in scorched earth tactics while Graham has the gavel.

However, Kavanaugh's analysis being arguably incorrect does not make it any more of a threat.  It is still merely a prediction on his part that he doesn't wish to see happen.

Also, I don't mind responding to others.  I just don't feel like engaging with someone who is threatening to try and affect my standing with the moderators and posting privileges.  If you want to talk, that's fine.

Certainly.  Garland, at worst, had his time wasted.  His reputation is intact, enhanced even as no one bothered to speak out against him and he was gifted an (unjustified) reputation as a moderate.  No one's going to see what happened to Garland and have to think long and hard about whether they want to put their family through what he went through.

Basically, Republicans decided that they didn't want to vote on Obama's nominee.  It's not the first time that a judicial nominee has seen their nomination lapse by the other side running out the clock.  It's not even the hundredth time.

Personally, I would make a Senate rule whereby a vote is automatically called for after a certain number of days, but that rule doesn't exist.

Kavanaugh, on the other hand.  Well, people have stuck guns in their mouths and pulled the trigger over matters less vicious.  His wife and daughters will have to live with the whispers and venom.  I say this with seriousness, that anyone who goes through what Kavanaugh was put through should probably get counseling for both themselves and their entire family afterwards because an experience that traumatic will almost inevitably leave scars.

The two really aren't comparable.  One is a simple process decision that frustrates at most, the other is downright destructive by design.

I don't believe so.  The success of one and failure of the other came down to simple votes, not the virtues of the two tactics.

Garland knew he didn't have the votes when he accepted the nomination.  Republicans had already stated their intent not to move forward on a nominee.  The whole thing was political theater.  If we're being honest, he basically accepted a gig as a political prop for a few months.

• Happened to John Quincy Adams waiting for Jackson.
• The Senate set aside a whole series of nominees from Tyler without a vote, leaving the seat open after the death of a justice about 7 months longer than Scalia waiting for the new president.  3 of the 4 people he nominated received no vote.
• Fillmore also nominated three people to fill a vacancy and was ignored by Congress (to be filled by a president of the same party).
• Andrew Johnson submitted a nominee and not only did Congress not vote for him, but hated him so much they voted the whole seat out of existence.
• LBJ's Chief Justice nominee lost support and never got a vote before he withdrew his nomination (and shortly thereafter resigned as an Associate Justice), basically cancelling the nomination he had in place for a replacement.  Johnson didn't even bother nominating a second person despite having 3 months left in his presidency and it being a time where nominations generally went a lot faster.  In that case I'll note there were intra-party issues with Southern Democrats.

I've already said I would support a change to automatically trigger a voter after a certain time on nominees.  However, I don't see how Republicans taking a path that would cause the least amount of political heartburn for them means all that much.  Both parties in both houses routinely either spike votes that could be used against them and bring to the floor show votes just to make the other side look bad.  And they regularly bottle things up in committee as the mechanism.

I really don't see what is new here.  I also don't believe that Garland would have gotten the 2 Republican Senators in the judiciary committee he would have needed to get out of committee even if he did receive a vote.  Maybe Graham would have made the vote a tie, but no one else comes to mind, and I rather doubt Graham would have voted for him either.  And Flake wasn't a swing vote until Trump became president.

You're also kinda pointing out a bit of the theater yourself and that Garland was not chosen so much because he was the best candidate, but because talking points can be generated when the already announced plan to ignore him goes into effect.

I'm not one to have much patience for political posturing from either side.  So a clean "nope" is just fine for me.  I didn't even require a historical justification beyond knowing that Democrats would have totally done the same if they were in power and so I think it's fair game.

(—Jackson's first nomination of Taney seems at a glance to be a very comparable situation; I wonder why you didn't mention it?  Jackson got his way in the end, though.)  

I didn't include him because he got through eventually.  But you're right, that was a case of Congress refusing a president until after an election.  It just so happened to be a midterm that year.

—I agree that Tyler's nominees are as mentioned a similar situation, except that one of his nominees went through eventually (this justice having a very strong and noncontroversial reputation).  But it's worth mentioning that although there were four nominations, there were only two seats.

Just to clear up.  I'm only speaking to the 2nd seat and not the one that was filled a year earlier.  The second seat had 4 failed nominees all by itself (though one or two overlapped for both I think).  As Tyler did fill the first one, even with some difficulty, I didn't count it.

—I didn't immediately find a lot of information about what was going on with Fillmore; the judge who withdrew his name made me wonder what was going on there.  But definitely belongs on the list

Actually, I messed up on Fillmore.  He wasn't the same party.  He was somewhat in the same boat as Tyler as a Whig VP who ascended when the president died early in office and so had questions about legitimacy and a Congress that just didn't take him seriously.

Don't know how I messed up the party of a president.

—Johnson's situation does not deserve to be put on this list.  Additionally, can you cite your source on Congress's motivation for reducing the number of justices?  I found nothing to support your claim and more than one source claiming the opposite:

I suppose Johnson's case can be disputed.  However, I'll note that Congress suddenly acted on the 1866 Judiciary Act just after Congress started angrily overriding Johnson's vetoes.  Maybe it wasn't the original intention of the bill to strip Johnson of power, but it's hard to imagine that it wasn't on the minds of Congress that they were limiting a hated president's power as they were passing it.  Why Johnson signed it, I'm honestly not sure.

And, just as importantly, Congress restored the Supreme Court to 9 members just in time for the incoming President Grant to make the nominations only 3 years later.  I find it highly unlikely that the timing of both the removal and reinstatement of Supreme Court seats is coincidental to the president with easily the worst relationship with Congress in our nation's history and that the same would have happened to Lincoln were he not murdered.

Regarding "both Bushes":  this is the first I'm hearing about a proposed block on Dubya's Supreme Court appointments.  And I've already argued that Biden was arguing for Bush to (in the event of a late election year vacancy) wait until after the election and then push a nominee through without the political warfare screwing things up. 

I don't believe that's a reasonable interpretation of Biden's comments.  He never makes that promise, and it's highly unlikely that in just over 2 months between the election and inauguration day he would rush a nominee from a lame-duck president through committee between two separate Congresses, Thanksgiving and Christmas recesses interrupting in between, and preparing the committee and holding hearings for the incoming president's many nominees.  And on top of that, he'd need to convince Sen. Mitchell to schedule a vote and for several of his fellow Democrats to vote with him in gifting Republicans a Supreme Court seat when all they have to do is wait a week and Clinton would inherit the first Democrat-controlled vacancy since Fortas fell through back in the 60s...

I can't begin to explain just how unlikely that that is.  Either Biden didn't mean he'd push through a lame-duck nominee, he was grossly naive about the feasibility of doing so, or he was just blowing smoke to justify his desire to stop a potential nominee.  I don't think he was even pretending and that Democrat talking points that he was just looking for a reasonable delay and would make it right once the election was over are misinterpretations from 25 years later in order to justify the shoe being on the other foot and Republicans using Biden's words against him.

When he talks about Bush making a nominee, it's only reasonable to think that he was saying that in the case Bush won.  There is, indeed, a lot of talk about the "next administration" in this speech.  There is also a bit about how Biden said that he would support someone like Souter or Kennedy that talk shows like to parade around as proof that he was going to hold these hearings and push Bush's nominee through, but if you watch the video those remarks come like 10 minutes later after a lengthy complaint about how right wingers have taken over the judicial selection process and is pretty-well orphaned from his earlier remarks about his warning to Bush not to nominate someone until after November.  Putting the two together is actually more of an out-of-context splice.  Here's the video, Biden's floor speech is about an hour in.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?26768-1/senate-session

For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure the real audience for Biden's remarks were the members of the Supreme Court who might have wanted to retire under a Republican president in case Bush didn't win and Biden warning them that it wouldn't work.

As for Bush 43, here's Schumer in 2007 saying that he would recommend not confirming any Supreme Court nominees except in "extraordinary circumstances".   And Schumer had already gotten Democrats together to block several of Bush's lower court nominees despite Republicans holding a sizable majority through the then-novel use of the filibuster, so this was not an idle threat from someone out of power.  This was the architect of the party's judicial strategy, a role he played so well they made him the party leader.  And here he is laying down a strategy of no more Supreme Court nominees from Bush.

https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2016/02/16/chuck-schumer-supreme-court-nomination-president-sot-erin.cnn/video/playlists/supreme-court-justice-antonin-scalia-dead/

BTW, when speaking with Trump about the Kennedy vacancy, the only compromise candidate Schumer named was Garland, which, yeah, there was no compromise or special circumstance that was within the realm of reason.

ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Woman%27s_Health_v._Hellerstedt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald_v._City_of_Chicago

Don't think Kagan's made a specific ruling on the 2nd Amendment, but the rest of them all have (and I rather doubt she'll buck the trend).  And I probably should have said liberal instead of Democrat nominee.