Laurence Tribe: GOP ‘Holding Country’ ‘Hostage’ by Blocking SCOTUS Pick

MATTHEWS: "Let’s talk about how stalling works. We all know how the legislative processes play with the clock. People wait until the last minute to jam in their stuff to get what they want. They play basically kidnapping of legislation. But here we have the kidnapping of a presidential appointee. If the next president comes in and it’s Cruz, you can predict Cruz’s appointment. Rubio would be hard to predict. And Trump would be hard to predict. They would appoint a pro-life U.S. associate justice and you would have decisions like the ones that are affecting undue burden down in Texas now. Those are judgment calls it seems to me."
TRIBE: "They are. You can say you believe in originalism and textualism. But in all of these cases, there are different ways of reading the original meaning of the Constitution. And there are deep judgment calls. That’s why elections have consequences. And the astonishing thing is for the Republicans to say the people should choose, as though they are entitled to say that Barack Obama never was a legitimate president. And I’ve heard that from a lot of them. They just can’t accept the idea of, frankly, his African-American president being legitimate. And I think that in the end, whether they are to the Left or to the Right, people are going to rebel against that. The way they rebelled really against FDR’s idea of packing the court. This is a kind of court unpacking. It’s not just, you know, holding the president and his nominees hostage, it’s holding the country and its highest court hostage. It’s shameful." [crosstalk] 
MATTHEWS: "Not all the conservatives — professor, a certain subset of the people in the hard Right cannot understand the idea that their kids and grand kids are going to pick up a picture book of presidents and sea Barack Obama in the list. They don't want him there."
TRIBE: "I’m afraid that’s true."
MATTHEWS: "They want to be able to put an asterisk next to him, and say he wasn't really a president, or or here illegally or because he was birther, or he wasn't really here legally. They really can't stand it. And by the way, it’s in the polling, if you don’t believe me. Professor Lawrence Tribe, thank you so much  for joining us tonight on this important political night as well as political night."