Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska was absolutely right today to say that some of his Democratic colleagues are playing “mobster politics” with the Supreme Court.

Sasse’s comment came as he joined the release of a well-worded letter from all 53 Senate Republicans to the clerk of the Supreme Court, urging the court not to be intimidated by very thinly veiled political threats made by five Democratic senators. In an official friend-of-the-court brief on a pending gun control case, those five had written the following: