The GOP’s Obama-era strategy treated wrecking the system as an acceptable alternative to losing.

Evidence

This stand was emblematic of how the Republican Party would approach the rest of Obama’s time in office. Either Republicans would succeed in stopping Obama’s agenda or they would wreck the system itself. To this end, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, embraced and expanded use of the filibuster to nullify the president’s ability to nominate federal judges and fill vacancies in the executive branch. And after Republicans took the Senate majority in 2014, he led an extraordinary blockade of the Supreme Court, thereby robbing Obama of a Supreme Court nomination. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 654

Categorization

• XREF: This nullification-through-procedure claim connects to the chapter’s core framing argument that originalism is a tactic of minority rule, and echoes the Wilentz dispute over how ‘original’ meaning is weaponized.