So Pat Toomey cravenly pivoted on Trump’s SCotUS pick? Shocking.

As The Washington Post columnist George F. Will notes, there’s something primary school-ish about the GOP’s assertion that “Democrats would have done it.” As if that’s justification enough for this nakedly Machiavellian calculation.

If Republicans wanted the seat, they should’ve been up front about their naked avarice in the first place, without cloaking it in pseudo-constitutional reasoning. It would have led to the same firefight, but at least Republicans would have had the virtue of some principle, rather than the plain-English prevarications to which we’re now being treated.

In his eight years in the Senate, Toomey has played the part of the deliberative intellectual. And, indeed, in matters of free trade and gun violence reduction there’s been the bare minimum of independence. In other words, when the risk of political exposure is minimal and the possibility of good headlines are high, Toomey’s been there.

But on the really big stuff, from impeachment to the confirmation of Gorsuch and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, Toomey has fallen right into line.

Every time.

Four years ago, with his re-election on the line, Toomey tried to play it clever on whether he’d vote for Trump, delaying his announcement until an hour before the polls closed. And when it finally came, Toomey’s ballot choice had an air of depressing inevitability about it.

“In the end, I decided we’ve gotta change the course we’re on, so I voted for Donald Trump,” Toomey said, according to Philadelphia Magazine.

In 2020, Toomey might end up proving himself strangely prescient, with an outraged electorate deciding they’re going to need to change course on the Senate’s Republican majority, and bounce him and his vertebrae-free colleagues out of office.

After all, it is the voters, 2016 Toomey would tell you, who get the final say.

Copyright 2020 John L. Micek, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. An award-winning political journalist, John L. Micek is Editor-in-Chief of The Pennsylvania Capital-Star in Harrisburg, Pa. Email him at jmicek@penncapital-star.com and follow him on Twitter @ByJohnLMicek.