Van Jones — who previously served as a special adviser to President Barack Obama — said Democrats were “angry” and that Biden didn’t want to take their “teddy bear” away, but that the issue was hurting his brand.

“Yeah, D-minus on that answer. There’s just no way around it,” Van Jones replied. “And now he’s put himself in this odd position where he says he’s going to wait until some other date. I guess what he’s saying is that he’s holding out some hope that they won’t nominate this new justice if he continues to play this game. It doesn’t make any sense. None of it makes any sense. And so I think the reality is the Democrats are very angry and upset, because at every level of the government right now it feels like the deck is stacked against us.”

“We’ve got two Supreme Court Justice seats that we don’t feel were given to the Republicans fairly,” he added. “You feel like the Electoral College stacks the deck against Democrats. You feel like the Senate’s got the filibuster. All these different things. The gerrymandering. So there’s so much pent-up frustration that Democrats are feeling that this issue of being able to pack the court has become a teddy bear for a lot of Democrats to hug on to at night and he doesn’t want to take the teddy bear away. But I think he’s hurting his own brand by not doing it. I think it’s better for him to come forward and say, ‘That’s not my brand of politics, I’m not going to do it,’ or, to your point, say he’s going to use it as a bargaining chip. But right now I think he’s hurting his brand.”