The asterisk in my memory of this Democratic debacle will be the memory of failed  comedian Al Franken who took a senate gig because it paid better asking ridiculous questions of Gorsuch who clearly had double the senator's IQ and was a brilliant jurist swatting this clown aside like an annoying mosquito.

Gorsuch is a superbly qualified jurist in the political mode of the great justice he replaced,  Scalia.  

It is rare for any president in the final year of his term to nominate someone to the supreme court.

It is even rarer - and perhaps unprecedented - for a president in the final year of his term to nominate a jurist for the supreme court who is the clearly of a different political persuasion than the judge they will be replacing and also would change the political balance of the court as Garland would have done.

But Obama, while a perpetual pussycat internationally, was basically a bully with congress and thought he could push the Garland nomination through.