> Conservatives started going crazy long before that. Keep in mind that there was no "The Resistance" before Trump was elected, and Trump being elected is absolutely mind bogglingly crazy.
When exactly was that? Republicans ran "Mittens" Romney in 2012 (and John McCain in 2008). Two men whose adherence to institutional norms is irreproachable. Yet, as Vice President, Joe Biden said that Romney would put Black people “back in chains.” That was after prominent Democrats spent years claiming Bush “stole” the 2000 and 2004 elections. https://freebeacon.com/elections/terry-mcauliffe-championed-...
Then Trump won in a fair election in 2016, and Republicans won the House by a million and a half votes. Democrats went completely ape-shit at the emergence of Trump, and the media, unelected bureaucrats, etc., all shredded institutional norms in response to him. Clinton claimed he was an “illegitimate President.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trum.... The rhetoric convinced half of Democrats that Putin had “tampered with vote tallies” to get Trump elected: https://twitter.com/sahilkapur/status/815256370958237696?s=2...
All the crazy stuff from conservatives--the election denialism, etc.--came in response to that.
> Further, Trump being elected happened nearly a decade after the emergence of the Tea Party, a batshit insane movement.
There's nothing "batshit insane" about the Tea Party. They're just the ideological wing of the party, just like the AOC/Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. The Tea Party did nothing outside of established procedures.
> Abandonment of institutional values? Like refusing to even try negotiating legislation with any resemblance of good faith to do good by the citizens of the country?
The parties obviously disagree about what's "good" for the country. “Not doing what Democrats want” isn’t a breach of political norms.
In the U.S., the primary lawmaking body is the House. Democrats lost that in 2010 by almost 6 million votes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_House_of_Re.... Republicans have no obligation to move forward on Obama's legislative priorities when they control the House, just as Democrats had no obligation to move forward on Trump's legislative priorities when they won control of the House in 2018.
> Like the explosion of the use of the filibuster in 2009?
The explosion in the filibuster was done by Democrats at the end of Bush's last two years: https://www.senate.gov/legislative/cloture/clotureCounts.htm. It was double in 07-08 compared to 05-06. It was no higher in Obama's first two years than in Bush's last two years. The filibuster is a red herring in the last six years of Obama's term, because Democrats didn't control the House and couldn’t win a majority for their legislative agenda anyway.
Remember, the filibuster is a legislative rule that can be overturned by a simple majority vote of the Senate, which Democrats had from 2007 to 2014. They could have dropped the filibuster at any point during that 7-year span. They didn’t do it because it’s critical to their strategy.
> Like refusing to bring a Supreme Court justice nomination to a vote on the floor of the Senate?
This is the only thing that comes close to qualifying as a norm violation.