Who is our mystery guest among Senate Republicans? Patience, please!

To set the scene, the return of John Fetterman to the Senate has not solved all the problems Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin face — especially the latter. Durbin sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and so does Dianne Feinstein — who’s been MIA for months and has no return date. That leaves the SJC evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, and it leaves Joe Biden’s radical judicial nominees in limbo, as it takes a majority vote for them to move forward to confirmation in the full Senate.

Democrats want to swap Feinstein out with another Senate Democrat until her return. That maneuver, however, has to be approved by the full Senate and is subject to a filibuster. That left SJC chair Durbin begging for some Republican help to uncork the conveyor belt of Biden’s progressive judicial picks:

“It just boils down to this — tomorrow this could happen to the Republicans, and they could find themselves in a vulnerable position through no fault of their own,” he told a group of reporters, including NBC News, on Capitol Hill. “I hope that they’ll show a little kindness and caring for their colleague. She’s in a delicate part of her life and her Senate service and they should stand by her and give her a dignified departure from the committee.”

“She is obviously sensitive to the fact that her absence has an impact on the committee,” he continued. “I think we can take care of this issue, do it very quickly, and I hope we can find 10 Republicans who will join us in that effort.”

Ahem. It’s worth noting at this point that Durbin played a key role in the scheme to block Miguel Estrada from getting confirmed to the appellate court because he was a Hispanic conservative. Durbin also helped run the Harry Reid-Chuck Schumer strategy to politicize judicial appointments in the Bush 43 administration, nearly leading to the “nuclear option” in 2005. Reid pulled the pin on it anyway in 2013, even after Senate Republicans went along with a compromise in 2005, when they put Barack Obama’s judicial appointments under heavy scrutiny.

Now, suddenly, Durbin wants “kindness and caring” from his opponents in the Senate. Ask Miguel Estrada how much of that he experienced from Durbin et al.

Besides, this wouldn’t be a problem at all if the nominees under consideration had been chosen in a cooperative manner and had broad appeal. Those kinds of nominees wouldn’t get stuck in committee waiting for a party-line vote to proceed to confirmation. Durbin wants Republicans to cooperate in order to confirm progressive activists to the bench.

That effort is so transparently hypocritical that it produced the response in the headline from — wait for it — Mitt Romney.

Mitt Romney?

Indeed, Mitt Romney:

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, also rejected the proposal.

“They’d like Republicans to help them speed the appointment of more liberal justices? Yes — when hell freezes over,” he said.

John Cornyn concurred, while pointing out the obvious:

“These are, by definition, the most controversial nominees,” Cornyn told NBC News. “And if Democrats are depending strictly on their own party-line vote to get them out of committee— I don’t think there’s any appetite on our side to help what we consider to be controversial or unqualified nominees to get confirmed.”

Asked whether there’s a path to winning the 10 Senate Republicans needed to break a filibuster and execute the swap, he said: “I don’t think so.”

Without Romney? Durbin has maybe two potential votes among the Senate GOP. Wait, make that one:

Centrist Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said she, too, is against the swap. “She’s been an extraordinary senator. She’s a friend of mine. During the past two years, there has been a concerted campaign to force her off of the Judiciary Committee. And I think that’s wrong, and I won’t be a part of that,” Collins said.

Well … has anyone heard from Lisa Murkowski? NBC News didn’t, but it seems very unlikely that Murkowski would want to position herself to Romney’s left, or more accurately, into the frozen-hell position Romney left with Durbin. It wouldn’t do any good anyway, not for Durbin and certainly not for Murkowski.

So what’s next for Durbin and Schumer? They will either have to wait until (and if) Feinstein returns to move the most radical nominees out of Judiciary, or they will have to permanently replace her on the committee. That only takes a simple majority in the Senate (as opposed to the temporary swap), but these days a simple majority ain’t so simple. The return of Fetterman and Mitch McConnell have rebalanced the upper chamber to a 50-49 Democrat advantage, but that’s only if Schumer can get Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to play along. Both have terms up in 2024 in states that aren’t blue, which makes playing along with Durbin a dangerous choice in 2023. Durbin, Schumer, and Biden may be stuck for a while. A long while.

Update: Cocaine Mitch makes it official — and succinct:

It's official. McConnell: "Senate Republicans will not take part in sidelining a temporarily absent colleague off a committee just so Democrats can force through their very worst nominees."

— Seung Min Kim (@seungminkim) April 18, 2023