False premise, Karl.
Hmmm, that's a game-cnanger. Now I'll have to go rethink it through to figure out if I went wrong somewhere .... :-)
OTOH, there are plenty of other news sources I trust, and GOP sources, who say GOP Senators seriously had been counting on Harry overestimating his ability to get all the leftist nominees through, when taking into account the lack of time and the remaining procedural blocks the GOP had left to them.
A Wash. Times article last night had this to say: "Much of the last week’s fighting in the Senate has dealt with timing of votes rather than the substance of the issues. Republicans are trying to use the few days left in the year to prevent Democrats from installing several dozen nominations before Republicans take control. By coming in Saturday, Mr. Reid was given an extra two days." And this: "Reid spokesman Adam Jentleson issued a statement thanking Mr. Cruz for helping them speed up a number of nominations." (Obviously sarcasm. But is it pure sarcasm, or containing some truth?)
Sure, I'll give you that Dingy Harry has been making noises about his plans to raise all those stalled nominations from the dead. But planning and wishing and hoping that he'd have time to do ALL of it, is a different thing than actually executing his plans. Time has almost run out for this lamest of ducks, and whether or not Harry really would have gotten 100% of everything on his Christmas Wish List done is/was an open question.
We'll never know for sure what might have happened, but one thing for certain is that Cruz/Lee's refusal to join Friday's 98-2 Unanimous Consent motion to adjourn 'til Monday, which resulted in the weekend session, which in turn added plenty of extra time for all of those Stench-In-The-Nostrils Nominations to be pulled up from the grave, made it MUCH more likely those nominees would/can be rammed through.
Look at senate.gov for Saturday and you'll see that ICE-Queen-To-Be Sarah Saldana and a dozen other Obama picks all got thru the next nomination phase of "Motion to Proceed to Executive Session". Her nomination process started *ages* ago (August?), yet still has not gotten all the way through the Nomination Gauntlet, with only mere hours left in the last gasp of Harry's And Nancy's And Barry's Gilded Age. Now she'll be the new Immigration Czar, the same woman who's been raving about how *utterly wonderful* and in particular how *legal* were BO's Royal Proclamations of New Immigration Law.
Still 100% comfortable with this trade we made?
To me, trading a symbolic vote for generations of awful judicial decisions is yet another example of "Style Over Substance".