Y’know, it’s funny you mention this, because you literally just made the argument brought up in InnuendoStudio’s latest video: “The Alt-Right Playbook: You Go High, We Go Low”. Like, literally exactly the argument. (Great channel, by the way, totally worth looking into.) “You called us out for doing this thing, now you’re doing that thing, therefore you’re hypocrites.”
The thing is, though, it’s a bad argument. How does this argument work, exactly? We’re hypocrites because, in the past, we favored an up-or-down vote and now we don’t. Except… no, it doesn’t work like that. Our support of an up-or-down vote, our claim to its sanctity and importance? That was based on democratic norms; an understanding that “this is how we do things”. The same norms that led democrats to not block Samuel Alito (even though they technically could have). Norms which have been thoroughly destroyed. The “sanctity” is gone. It’s not just gone, it’s gone because your side killed it, because Mitch McConnell thought winning was more important.
And I’d say that there are way more important things than hypocrisy. Like, y’know, democratic norms. But, as McConnell has shown, what’s even more important than that is winning. The right wing has shown this quite admirably. They’ve run completely roughshod over every principle they claimed to hold dear, they’ve violated democratic norms up and down the line, and as a result, they have a strong, long-lasting majority in the supreme court, control over both houses of congress, numerous systemic advantages they created for themselves by attacking voter’s rights and the census, and control over the white house. They can basically do whatever the fuck they want (insofar as what they want isn’t monstrous or so unpopular that it’d lead to them immediately losing that power, which, it may surprise you to hear, doesn’t leave very much of their agenda on the table). So yeah, if a little hypocrisy is all it takes to win, fuck, I’ll take that any day!
Of course, as explained above, it’s not hypocritical. If you’d like to see hypocrisy, consider that your side destroyed those norms, while you are currently appealing to them. That’s hypocritical. If you start punching me in the face, and I tell you to stop, this does not mean that when I hit back, I’m suddenly a hypocrite, because the principle I was appealing to is either one you do not share, in which case I see no reason to be equally bound by it, or it’s constructed in such a way as to not be stupid (i.e. “You’re not allowed to hit people unless it’s in self-defense”). Being the aggressor in such a situation changes the context.