Other than saying “we need to vote these senators out” how would the Democrats respond to a terms worth of stonewalling by the Republican senate?
There's an argument that still fits with a lib-brained loyalty to the rules of government:
If Congress refuses to even vote on a nominee for years at a time, that's reducing the size of the Supreme Court.
There's already a process for setting the size of the Supreme Court and Congress can't change that through inaction.
Congress also can't eliminate the Supreme Court without passing a constitutional amendment, and if they have the power to indefinitely stonewall nominees they have the power to eliminate the Supreme Court.
How would this work procedurally? I could see the nominee being named, Republicans stating their intention to stonewall, after some time the Attorney General writing a letter to the Court stating the above and saying the President considers the Senate to have approved the nominee by not voting them down (maybe this gets framed as a recess appointment somehow), then the Court deciding what to do.
What would stop Republicans from voting on the nominee, rejecting them, and then similarly rejecting every nominee Biden puts forward? I think after enough of that you could make a similar argument to the above, and I also think Republicans wouldn't like the optics of that/wouldn't be able to get the votes for that (because otherwise they would have done it in 2016).
if the Courts were to rule on this process why would we assume party objectives wouldn’t come into consideration?
Although every member of the judiciary is partisan, not every member is equally partisan. At least some of them (up to and including at least some members of the Supreme Court) give at least somewhat of a shit about maintaining the integrity of the courts as an institution. It's a type of small-c conservatism that cares about maintaining the status quo over doing everything possible to protect the interests of capital. "The President gets to pick Supreme Court justices" is about as status quo as it gets, so it's believable that they would protect that. The Supreme Court in particular is aware of FDR's court-packing scheme back in the 1930s and the resurgence of similar ideas in the past few years. They could also view indefinite stonewalling as a fast track to that, which they would want to avoid for a number of reasons.
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There's an argument that still fits with a lib-brained loyalty to the rules of government:
How would this work procedurally? I could see the nominee being named, Republicans stating their intention to stonewall, after some time the Attorney General writing a letter to the Court stating the above and saying the President considers the Senate to have approved the nominee by not voting them down (maybe this gets framed as a recess appointment somehow), then the Court deciding what to do.
What would stop Republicans from voting on the nominee, rejecting them, and then similarly rejecting every nominee Biden puts forward? I think after enough of that you could make a similar argument to the above, and I also think Republicans wouldn't like the optics of that/wouldn't be able to get the votes for that (because otherwise they would have done it in 2016).
Although every member of the judiciary is partisan, not every member is equally partisan. At least some of them (up to and including at least some members of the Supreme Court) give at least somewhat of a shit about maintaining the integrity of the courts as an institution. It's a type of small-c conservatism that cares about maintaining the status quo over doing everything possible to protect the interests of capital. "The President gets to pick Supreme Court justices" is about as status quo as it gets, so it's believable that they would protect that. The Supreme Court in particular is aware of FDR's court-packing scheme back in the 1930s and the resurgence of similar ideas in the past few years. They could also view indefinite stonewalling as a fast track to that, which they would want to avoid for a number of reasons.