Option 1.
Republicans have no respect for the Constitution.
Just curious, how do we have no respect for the Constitution? McConnell and other Senators have just as much a right to vote down Obama's nominees as Obama has the right to nominate them.
Well when you have McConnell not just saying he'd not vote for the nominee, he'd deny a hearing on such. And the front-runner of your party saying on the matter "delay, delay, delay". I didn't hear this coming from the Democrats in 1987/8. To be fair, the Democrats tried to invoke the Thurmond rule in the waining days of Dubya, which is dumb, but the Thurmond rule actually applied there.