Today, Americans got two competing visions of who should control the Supreme Court. On Capitol Hill, Senate Democrats staged a mock confirmation hearing for Judge Merrick Garland, President Obama’s nominee to fill the seat left vacant by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. Meanwhile, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee issued a list of jurists from whom he would pick the person to fill Scalia’s spot. Both were calculated ploys intended to mobilize the bases of the two parties for the upcoming presidential election. But while neither Garland nor any of Trump’s 11 potential justices may ever wind up serving on the Court, both of these pieces of political theater should remind us that the real decision about the future of the judiciary will be decided by the voters in November and, at least in this respect, they are being given a clear choice.

The Democrats’ mock hearing for Garland is the latest in a campaign intended to shame Republicans into confirming the liberal judge solidifying the left’s hold on the high Court. But like every other gambit they’ve tried, this one fell flat. The stunt convinced no one that isn’t already supporting President Obama’s effort to alter the political balance on the court to change their mind. Polls may show a majority of Americans are sympathetic to the idea that the vacancy on the court should be filled. But this is an unprecedented attempt to flip the Court in a presidential election year where a different party than the one in charge of the White House controls the Senate. Everyone on both sides knows that if the situation were reversed and an outgoing Republican president wanted a Democrat-controlled Senate to confirm a fifth conservative justice, they would do as Vice President Biden said they would in 1992 or Chuck Schumer noted in 2007 and refuse to act. At a time when the country is so starkly divided along ideological and partisan lines, the notion that either side has virtue on its side in such a debate is risible.