The idea that the 114th Senate is acting without precedent in rejecting, without a hearing, President Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court is being advanced in a just-published study by New York University. A tip of the hat to the Times’ Adam Liptak for unearthing this study. He quotes one of the two authors of the study as saying: “There really is something unique about the position Republican senators are taking with respect to the Scalia vacancy.”

Maybe. The professors — Robin Bradley Kar and Jason Mazzone — have certainly ploughed through a lot of history searching for precedent. They include a chart of what they call the complete historical record of all vacancies and nominations to the high bench. But we ran the same data through the New York Sun’s “Article II and Article III Constitutional Dis-Entangler.” The one we have is one of the old “Luther Martin” brand steam-operated contraption. And it has made a startling discovery.

The authors failed to adjust for the 2014 election. Can you imagine? They constructed an entire chart of Supreme Court nominations, starting with John Jay. They found no exception to this general rule: “Whenever a Supreme Court vacancy has existed during an elected President’s term and this President has acted prior to the election of a successor, the sitting President has been able to both nominate and appoint someone to fill the relevant vacancy—by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.”

Well, of course if one states the rule that way there are no exceptions. But what in the world does that prove? What our steam-operated Luther Martin Constitutional Disentangler found — and it took it about ten seconds — is that it’s not the Senate that is acting without precedent but the President. No previous president has ever submitted to the Senate a nominee who runs so directly against the meaning of what happened in the 2014 by-election and gotten away with it. Not since ratification of the 17th Amendment, granting the people the power directly to choose senators.

Incidentally, we can understand why the professors overlooked this. The 2014 election was such a long time ago, nearly two full years, that professors tend to forget. But what happened in that election is that by a slide of land, the American people revoked Democratic control of the Senate and gave it to the Republicans. The Democrats lost nine seats and the Republicans gained nine. The swing was a stunning rebuke to the President and to the Democrats.

Whatever one can say about the American people, one cannot say they are dumb. (The Times tried to say that after the vote, but it was unconvincing.) The voters knew what they were doing. They were signaling they wanted a change of direction. “Obviously, Republicans had a good night,” the President yukked. Yet in the face of this, he turned around nominated to the Supreme Court Judge Garland, who even the Times is reporting, “would still move the court in a progressive direction.”

Who in his right mind would do such a thing? One minute the voters yank the Democratic Party’s control of the Senate and give it to the Republicans, saying, among other things, that they want the Supreme Court to move to the right. The next thing the president does in respect of the Supreme Court is send the Senate a nominee who would move it to the left. We can find no precedent for a president doing this in the face of a nine-vote swing like the one of November 4, 2014. The President was just asking for trouble.

Let us say that we have no animus to Judge Garland. He’d have to go a way on gun control to get our endorsement, and Judge Garland looks as if he would give too much deference to administrative law (we’d rather see Professor Philip Hamburger, the emerging sage on that burgeoning question, on the Supreme Court). Judge Garland might be able to clear up some of this in a hearing. But we’re also sensitive not only to the Senate’s prerogatives but those of the American people. They’re the constitutional precedent the Senate is heeding.