The current situation, or President Hillary with emails/Benghazi hearings?

[Attorney General & PPT Dwarven Dragon]

^ On the Garland thing, I'm not sure what would have happened. Chuck Grassley, who has control over who gets a hearing in his committee, was very clear that he wouldn't treat a hypothetical President Hillary the same way he treated the outgoing President Obama on the issue. Obviously if Hillary put up, say, Ketanji Brown Jackson, it would be ignored, but Garland would likelier than not have been allowed a hearing. As far as how a hypothetical committee vote would go, democrats would need two republicans to approve the nomination to pass it by the minimum margin, 11-9 (no one on the committee was in a close race last year, so the committee would be the same people with Hillary + R senate) - so all they would need would be the two relative moderates - Graham and Flake. Doesn't sound terribly difficult. It looks bad if you're the Chairman and vote against what the majority of the committee wants, so if Graham and Flake were going to vote to advance the nomination, so would Grassley - so it passes 12-8. Then we come to the Senate Floor. Let's assume that McConnell doesn't just let the nomination take up space on the executive calendar for the next four years and holds a vote. Obviously he would keep the 60 vote rule intact in this scenario, but there is the question of whether the majority is still 52-48 R, or whether it is 51-49 R or 50+Pence-50 R - Depending on what it is, Democrats would need 10 to 12 republican votes. To scrounge up that much, one of two things would have needed to happen - either Hillary's image recovers greatly, like it did when she was SOS, and the party feels they have to staff the court to save Heller/Flake in '18, or Ginsburg/Breyer would have to leave the court, creating the scenario for a "great compromise" situation where Garland and some conservative are jointly confirmed.