From the last Morning Jolt of the week:

War-Gaming the Supreme Court Nomination Fight
Here’s the nice thing about having a Senate Majority Leader who was reelected in 2014 with 56 percent of the vote: If Mitch McConnell decides there will be no Senate vote for any Obama nominee, no one can overrule him, and he cannot be punished at the ballot box – presuming Kentuckians disagreed with his stance – until 2020.
As Sean Davis lays out, Democrats can do a lot to slow down the operating process in the Senate, attempting to pressure Republicans to A) hold hearings B) hold a committee vote C) hold a vote D) accept Obama’s nomination.
Democrats can file a “motion to discharge” the nomination, but they would need 60 votes – meaning the 44 Democrats, 2 Democrat-aligned independents would need to win over 14 Republicans to their side on the motion.
So the White House strategy will be to “shame” Senate Republicans…
Party officials are turning to a shaming campaign, seeking to badger Senate Republicans and label them obstructionists, in hopes that a few of them — presumably those with uphill re-election battles — will stop echoing the party line.
Obama, speaking at a press conference on Tuesday, made the argument that refusing to consider a nominee would show clear disregard for constitutional norms.
Wait, the president who filibustered Samuel Alito is arguing that the Republicans are being obstructionist? Yeah, try again, champ.
How many Senate Republicans might waver? Let’s assume that none of the Senate Republicans want to replace Scalia with a Sotomayor clone. The question is which Republicans represent usually-Democratic blue or purple states, where support for the president’s nominee is likely to be higher than average. Four immediately come to mind: Mark Kirk from Illinois, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania and maybe Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire.
All four could take a position that all nominees deserve fair consideration on their merits, that it’s a shame the partisan divisions have gotten so harsh, that we could all take a lesson from the warm friendship between Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg… they can be soft, cuddly Care Bears on this… and lament that despite all their best efforts for cooperation and comity, that darn McConnell just won’t budge.
Even then, all four could vote with the Democrats and still not give them enough votes for a motion to discharge. They could even say they would support Obama’s nominee if given the chance to vote. (They really shouldn’t, of course. It’s not like voting for the next Obama nominee will make their Democratic rivals take it easy on them in the 2016 Senate races.)
At some point in the coming weeks, Obama will nominate a Supreme Court justice – and then the debate shifts from being about whether the Republicans are unreasonable to consider any potential justice to what everyone thinks of this potential justice.
Ironically for Republicans, when it comes to Obama nominees, the worse, the better – in other words, the more ideologically extreme the nominee is, the easier it is to justify their “no” vote or refusing to vote at all.
It sounds like Joe Biden wants to see a moderate:
“This is a potentially gigantic game-changer,” Biden told a POLITICO reporter and a Washington Post reporter during a sitdown on Air Force Two. “My advice is the only way we get someone on the Court now or even later is to do what was done in the past.”
Biden mentioned two examples of Republican nominees who were confirmed in times of flux because they weren’t overtly ideological conservatives — current swing Justice Anthony Kennedy, “who wasn’t a conservative’s conservative,” and former Justice David Souter, who often ended up voting with the Court’s liberal wing. He said Obama also intends to nominate “someone who has demonstrated they have an open mind, someone who doesn’t have a specific agenda,” even though Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he shouldn’t bother nominating anyone in his last year.
Biden said he hasn’t met with Obama to discuss the nomination yet, and he refused to discuss specific candidates like U.S. District Court of Appeals Judge Sri Srinivasan, who was unanimously confirmed by the Senate in 2013. But he said there are plenty of available candidates without reputations as liberal advocates.