Did Chuck Grassley forget the Supreme Court was a 2012 campaign issue?

After some early dithering, Senator Grassley has announced that he will not allow the Senate to consider any person nominated by President Barack Obama to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court.

Grassley has explained that the task of 'finding the right person” to sit on the Court is 'monumental.” The American people, he says, should not be 'robbed” of their right to participate in the decision. They should be given the chance to decide, through their presidential vote, 'who they trust to nominate the next Supreme Court justice.”

As it turns out, it is Grassley's decision that will rob Americans of their voice.

During the Presidential election of 2012, Republican pundits and strategists repeatedly warned the American people that they should not vote for Obama because of the very real chance that a vacancy could occur on the Supreme Court during Obama's second term.

In a national column in USA Today, Gregg Nunziata (currently Marco Rubio's chief lawyer) told Americans that, with respect to the Supreme Court, the 2012 election was 'the most important election in our lifetime.” He begged voters to reject Obama and protect 'the Court's ideological balance.”

In the weeks before the election, major stories in newspapers across the country and on national television reminded Americans that their vote for president could determine who had the power to select the next member of the Supreme Court. In fact, in an effort to sway the electorate, some Romney advisers took the unprecedented step of identifying the person that Romney would likely nominate if a Supreme Court vacancy were to occur.

In other words, in 2012, Republicans asked the American people to vote explicitly on the question put by Senator Grassley: 'who do you trust to nominate the next Supreme Court justice?” By a margin of more than 4 million votes, the American people indicated that they trusted Barack Obama with that 'monumental” task.

Why did the voters decide that they wanted President Obama, a Democrat, to fill the next Supreme Court vacancy? One reason may well be the voters' reluctance to let any one party control any branch of government for too long.

Republicans have controlled the Supreme Court for the past 45 years (since 1971). For most of that time, they've held a supermajority, sometimes holding eight seats to one held by a Democrat. The position of Chief Justice (head of the nation's judiciary) has been held by a Republican for 63 years.

In the 2012 election, Republicans urged the voters to maintain Republican power over the judiciary by rejecting Obama. The voters responded by putting Obama back in the White House. They signaled, loudly and clearly, that they were ready for an end to nearly half a century of Republican domination of the third branch of government.

The voters elected President Obama to fill the next Supreme Court vacancy, and that vacancy is now upon us. Obama should be allowed to do the job he was elected to do.

Grassley's problem isn't that he wants to give the American people a chance to decide this issue. His problem is that he doesn't like the decision they've already made.

' Jonathan Carlson is a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law. The views expressed are his own.