Medium-cold take: Idea of McConnell as a super-genius whose every move is flawless is a bit off. He’s a high-risk gambler. He goes for maximal plays rather than half-measures (total use of filibuster, not dealing on stimulus/ACA). Sometimes it work, sometimes it backfires.

Filibustering everything: pretty successful as it stopped climate & immigration in 09, but also resulted in stronger ACA and Dodd-Frank

Blockading DC Circuit: initially worked, as seats weren’t filled before 2012 election. But then blew up as Dems got fed up & filled all 3 seats

On Supreme Court, this looks right now like a pure win, but a lot depends on how next 5-10 years go. The great advantages GOP had are they had a 5-4 majority for decades and that the filibuster mean they could appoint strong conservatives while Dems appointed moderates.

This discrepancy is rumored (and I stress rumored) to be a factor in why RBG didn’t retire in 13 - she felt a 55 majority Dem Senate would not be able to appoint someone who was as progressive as she was.

But now we find ourselves in a situation where Dems feel cheated and in an existential threat. If they court-pack, the GOP will counter court-pack, & result may be the loss of effective judicial review of statutes. That’s a loss for both parties but likely a harsher loss for GOP.

As we’ve seen with ACA, once benefits are granted, they’re hard to take away. The great tool of the conservative legal movement against the granting of additional benefits and rights was the judiciary, which could strike things down without involvement of political actors.

This got turned on it’s head during the 1950s-1970s when liberals, in part flummoxed by stasis on key issues in the legislature & in part by seeking rights that lacked majority support among the electorate, turned to courts to say those rights were required by the Constitution.

As a result, the conservative legal movement organized to “take back the courts.” And by and large they succeeded! The court generally stopped expanding individual rights in the 1980s, but without a mass backlash.

By the 2000s, the effort had been so successful that progressives were seeking to repackage conservative legal doctrines like textualism in pursuit of their aims. The sense in the liberal legal firmament as late as 2008 was that the Supreme Court was a fair tribunal for liberals.

Then, the Court got more aggressive across the board, not least the near destruction of the ACA, Citizens United, and Shelby County’s effective destruction of Voting Rights Act enforcement.

In tandem with the Garland imbroglio, which destroyed the argument that liberals could gain the court by winning elections, all the jurisprudence involving the Trump Admin left progressives feeing that this Court was partisan at her than ideological, that it wasn’t on the level.

Despite this, there remained a belief that a 5-4 conservative majority, one far to the right of any court since the 1930s, could be tolerated. Now comes the death of RBG and a likely 6-3 majority via open power politics.

Maybe there will be some unforeseen series of events that changes things, but my guess is that bipartisan court packing will be a major event of the 2020s, with the Court growing rapidly from admin to admin.

In the end, a maximal gamble by McConnell will likely end with the Court weakened and the conservative movement worse off than in 2006.