Every liberal should answer this simple question before ripping the GOP for blocking Obama's Scalia replacement

If you are a liberal who is outraged about the prospect of Senate Republicans blocking a potential Supreme Court successor to Antonin Scalia, ask yourself a simple question: What would you do to protect the essence of Roe v. Wade if the Supreme Court majority on which abortion rights depended was at risk?

If one vote on the Supreme Court was the difference between Roe being upheld or overturned, what legal and procedural means would you be willing to employ to prevent its reversal? You wouldn't delay the confirmation of a justice who seemed likely to be anti-Roe, perhaps indefinitely? If the president was an anti-abortion, anti-Roe Republican and there was at least a 50 percent chance a new pro-choice president would be elected in November, would you really allow your anti-obstructionist procedural views to trump your substantive commitment to abortion rights? Especially when we are merely talking about using well established Senate powers and procedures to keep the anti-choice forces at bay?

When many abortion rights supporters in the Senate thought they were facing the possibility of Roe's reversal in 1987, they rejected President Reagan's Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. Left unmentioned in President Obama's happy talk about Democratic senators confirming Ronald Reagan's Supreme Court nomination during his final year in office was that Anthony Kennedy was Reagan's third choice, confirmed months after the vacancy originally occurred and ultimately turned out to be the justice who wrote the majority opinion affirming the core of Roe in 1992.

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When pro-choice senators again thought they were voting on the fate of Roe v. Wade during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings in 1991, they bitterly opposed George H.W. Bush's nominee. While Anita Hill and sexual harassment dominated the headlines, abortion was certainly part of the urgency to stop the man who would become the second black justice of the Supreme Court.

Only because the Senate Democratic caucus was more ideologically and geographically diverse in the early 1990s than it is today did Thomas prevail narrowly, by a vote of 52-48.

Even after the borking of Bork and the near-borking of Thomas, an overwhelming majority of Senate Republicans voted to confirm Bill Clinton's nominees Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who sailed through 87-9 and 96-3, respectively.

Half the Democrats in the Senate voted against John Roberts, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Only four voted to confirm Samuel Alito. More than six times as many Senate Democrats instead voted to filibuster Alito, again including Obama and Clinton.

Even Scalia's unanimous confirmation vote in 1986 was partly because Democrats were reluctant to offend Italian-Americans before the election and partly because they were preoccupied with the promotion of William Rehnquist to chief justice.

The point of this trip down memory lane and the opening thought experiment isn't that Republicans are without hypocrisy on this issue (all you have to do is go back and look at what GOP senators said about Democratic judicial filibusters when George W. Bush was president to see there is plenty of hypocrisy on all sides). The real point is this: It is well within the mainstream for senators to recognize the enormity of a majority change on the Supreme Court — at least as consequential as a change in the Senate majority, if not more — and act accordingly.

Perhaps recognizing his own openness to charges of hypocrisy, Obama implied Tuesday that his opposition to Roberts and attempted filibuster of Alito were posturing that didn't stop either justice from being confirmed. (The Senate was then under Republican control.) But he didn't say so during the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries. And even if his support for the Alito filibuster was tactical or insincere, some outside groups were seriously advocating it.

Given the trajectory of judicial confirmation politics, is it not reasonable to expect more Democrats would filibuster Alito today? They certainly will filibuster the Alitos of the future if Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell holds firm on an Obama nomination this time around.

If ideology and judicial philosophy are legitimate reasons to oppose a judge's nomination — and given the Supreme Court's massive power, this seems reasonable — then presumptive opposition to an Obama nominee is hardly an act of unconstitutional nihilism.

The president has the power to nominate whomever he wants to the Supreme Court. The Senate has the power to reject them. This doesn't require reading anything extra into the text of the Constitution.

We'll leave that to President Obama's next high court nominee.