This is the kind of craziness that even formerly sensible liberals are starting to sink to. The new popular sentiment post-election is
1. Trump is not the president because Hillary may have won the popular vote
2. Republicans stole the Supreme Court by refusing to confirm Garland
The solutions to this vary from calls for a recess appointment to a permanently deadlocked court.
For Republicans, keeping the Supreme Court conservative was more urgent than governance or leadership or an independent judiciary. To reward that by meeting President Trump halfway on his nominees is not sober statesmanship. It’s surrender. Senate Republicans are already crowing that they can have a Justice Ted Cruz named in the coming days and seated by February. They can. But it is not his seat.
The only proper response from progressives today must be that Donald Trump is a lame-duck president with only four years left in his term, and we must let the people decide the next justice for the Supreme Court. Less fatuously, it must be to obstruct the nomination and seating of any Trump nominee to fill Scalia’s seat. We will lose. But that’s not the point now. Democrats need to repeat Ted Cruz’s lie that eight justices will suffice. If Democrats can muster the energy to fight about nothing else, it should be this, because even if you believe the election was fair or fair enough, the loss of this Supreme Court seat was not. That seat is Merrick Garland’s.
There isn't much of a plan here except to somehow block any of Trump's appointments. The obvious question though is even assuming Dems take the White House, what's to stop Republicans from simply refusing to accept the nominee of a new Democrat president. We would be basically looking at a permanently deadlocked Supreme Court on which the balance would shift only when its members die.
Taken to its logical insane conclusion, there would be no more Supreme Court.
Anyway, If Senate Democrats attempt to filibuster, Senate Republicans will probably just kill the filibuster for Supreme Court seats, as they have already promised to do, and as Democrats only last week were promising to do if they won the Senate. This is how it will go down. Democrats will live to regret the killing of the filibuster. But whether they killed it or Republicans do it, we knew it would go, and with it all the norms and values it represented.
Okay then and so...
But for all that I have railed against destructive partisanship directed at fragile courts, I am persuaded now that the only way to answer nihilism is with nihilism of our own.
Ladies and gentlemen... I give you the voice of reason.