GOP is citing this Joe Biden speech to justify blocking Obama's Supreme Court pick. Bad example.

Senate Republicans took the pretty brazen step on Tuesday of officially declaring they won't even hold hearings on President Obama's coming nominee to replace late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. "We believe the American people need to decide who is going to make this appointment rather than a lame-duck president," said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (Texas). But Republicans have also been citing precedent. On Monday, Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley (Iowa) said that not confirming justices during an election year was simply following "the Biden rules," referring to a recently unearthed clip of Vice President Joe Biden in June 1992.

At the time, Biden was Senate judiciary chairman, and his speech reiterates the so-called Thurmond Rule (which, incidentally, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said "doesn't exist" in 2008). In Biden's speech, highlights of which you can watch below, Biden urged then-President George H.W. Bush not to nominate a Supreme Court justice if a member of the court resigned in the summer or late fall, saying that if he did, "the Senate Judiciary Committee should seriously consider not scheduling confirmation hearings on the nomination until after the political campaign season is over."

On its surface, that's pretty good gotcha politics. The liberal site ThinkProgress went back and looked at the rest of the speech, and it turns out that 10 minutes after the part of the speech highlighted by conservatives, Biden called for a compromise candidate: "If the president consults and cooperates with the Senate or moderates his selections absent consultation, then his nominees may enjoy my support as did Justices [Anthony] Kennedy and [David] Souter." There were no Supreme Court vacancies that year, but Biden's committee approved 11 federal appellate judges in 1992.

Members of both parties have flip-flopped pretty shamelessly on Supreme Court nominations during election years, but as Jonathan Chait notes at New York, the GOP argument that they are "merely following historical precedent... is demonstrably false." And Biden's 1992 floor speech doesn't change that.