A Senate reset for approving a new justice

American democracy has enjoyed long periods of lawmakers in Washington being bound by a shared norm: Each party understood that tactics it used while in the majority would be used by the other when power changed hands. Recent decades of rising polarization, however, have eroded that stabilizing restraint and, along with it, much civic regard for minority interests. A continuous cycle of escalation, Brookings Institution scholar Benjamin Wittes told a federal panel last year, has given each party “a significant incentive to violate the current norms when it has the...