All these histrionics over President Obama’s Cabinet selections – John Brennan at CIA, Chuck Hagel at Defense and John Kerry at State – got me thinking about something.

If congressional Republicans are so up in arms over these guys, wait’ll an opening comes up on the U.S. Supreme Court.

The court right now has a narrow conservative majority. There are four reliably liberal justices: Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer. The court has four equally reliable conservatives: Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and the chief, John Roberts. Then you have Anthony Kennedy, a so-called “swing justice” who tilts mostly to the conservative side.

Sotomayor and Kagan are Obama selections, so they won’t go anywhere. Of the liberals on the court, Ginsberg seems the most likely to depart, given her frail health. Were she to go, Obama would pick another liberal to replace her. The battle would be stout, but not as ferocious as it could get.

I keep thinking about what might happen if one of the right-leaning justices were to leave the court. It’s a decent bet that none of them would leave with a Democrat in the White House, just as left-leaning justices would wait were there a Republican serving as president.

Still, I keep envisioning the apoplexy that would engulf conservatives if, by the strangest circumstance imaginable, one of their political brethren would leave the Supreme Court before Barack Obama leaves the presidency in January 2017.

The world would spin off its axis. The planet would be pummeled by meteors. The sun would rise in the west. Martians would hijack the Rover rolling across their planet and fly it back to Earth.

Any confirmation hearings involving a Democratic president replacing a Republican-appointed Supreme Court justice would make the Kerry-Hagel-Brennan hearings in the Senate look like a Tupperware party.

If only …