Biden is getting an undeserved amount of tut-tutting over his comments, which were BY NO MEANS intended to endorse segregationists or anything like that. His comments clearly note that when he started in the Senate, he would work with people whether he agreed with them or not. Because the art of compromise is precisely about working with people with whom you disagree.

Also, the Senate and our political culture even in the 1970s was not the same place where we are today in 2019. There were still segregationists in the Congress. Racism did not just vanish in the 1960s, as the current morass proves. But there was more of an attitude through most of the Congress of people trying to work together. There were always extreme Right Wingers who would vote against everything, but until recent years, those were always a tiny minority. Biden’s discussion is about a time when politicians really did try to work together to find common ground, even if they totally opposed each other in most areas. Tip O’Neill was able to work with the banality of the people in the Reagan White House, even though that Administration was filled with Hard Right Wingers and criminals. He just found common ground where he could so they could do the mundane tasks of government, like funding programs and managing the country.

In the current epoch, we no longer have Right Wingers who are willing to work with anyone on any issue. This situation was magnified when Bill Clinton was President, magnified again when W was allowed to take office despite losing the 2000 election, magnified again when President Obama was in office, and finally boosted to infinity with the present day Pence White House.

If Biden is wrong anywhere here, it is in his foolish assumption that the Right Wing has ANY intention of working with him on ANYTHING. Should he be elected, he will be completely stymied on every single move he makes if the GOP still controls the Senate. The Right Wing idea of “working with” the Dems involves the Dems completely surrendering on every single aspect of every single issue. Their idea of compromise is that they won’t ever do it – to the Right Wing, the compromising is supposed to be done by everyone ELSE. If the GOP still controls the Senate, a Biden White House would likely be unable to get any of their nominees to anything confirmed, let alone fill any judicial vacancies. The GOP would just take the position that the American people would wait until the NEXT presidential election to start filling those spots.

I think Truman may sadly be correct. Most really hardcore Right Wingers are salivating over the chance of provoking an armed conflict with Iran.

It’s a win-win-win for them. They get to bomb the heck out of a country they’ve hated since 1979, and they get to play the “We’ve got to re-elect Pence! We’re at WAR!!!” card. And they think this big shiny object will distract everyone from the continuing criminal morass of the Pence White House.

I truly hope that enough higher-ups in our military are able to put the brakes on the John Bolton-Mike Pompeo-Tom Cotton freight train.

The one real concern I have about 2020 is the uncertainty of whether the 2-3 million Dem voters in the swing states have learned their lesson from 2016 and 2018. If they stay home again for whatever reason, they will doom the country to another 4 years of Mike Pence as their acting president and a complete disaster as far as the courts and any semblance of a reasonable or sane country.

I’d agree that Trump is a rock star to the deplorables. No question. And acting President Pence is a rock star to the hardcore Right Wingers who love what he does for them – ie appoint the most partisan idealogues to every position and sneer at everyone in the world that isn’t a Right Winger or a fundamentalist. The difference between these crowds and the ones who applauded President Obama is that the deplorables are applauding viciousness and hatred. The people who cheered President Obama were looking forward and trying to see this country and this world evolve into something better.

I also agree that that the Puerto Rican population in Florida is not a good sign for the Pence White House’s efforts – particularly after Pence’s childish spokesman made light of what happened to Puerto Rico and sneered in their faces.

And I agree that Pence’s base has already maxed. The problem is whether the Dems show up to outnumber the deplorables. If they do, we’re fine. If they stay home, the deplorables win.

As for who the Dem candidate will be, any single one of them would be preferable to the Pence White House. Even Tulsi Gabbard. But it won’t be Gabbard. It won’t be Eric Swalwell. It won’t be Bill De Blasio. It most likely won’t be Bernie or Elizabeth Warren or Cory Booker either. I could be wrong there, but I don’t think so. And the issue will be whether any of the Dems try the card of staying home because they’re throwing a tantrum over who the final candidate is. I really hope people are more mature than that – we’re counting on EVERY VOTER showing up for both the presidential and the Senate races.

Tom Cotton has zero credibility here, given that he’s been foaming at the mouth to attack Iran for years. His happiest moment in office was when he committed treason by sending a vicious letter to the Iranians in the middle of John Kerry’s negotiation of the nuclear treaty, telling them not to sign it. He frankly should have been removed from office and prosecuted for that, but the Right Wing got away with it, as has been the pattern over the last few years.

Like Pence’s childish spokesman, Cotton’s remarks are the irrelevant rantings of an infant. The sad part of it today is that the other infant is able to ask Mike Pence to actually take military action.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders is undoubtedly hoping to get a cushy spot at Fox News, just like Dana Perino did before her. And I do think she will get paid a bunch of money to show up as a commentator – likely with her dad whenever possible. But she won’t be getting an anchor position any time soon. Simply because Fox News prefers its female anchors to look like they just walked in from winning the Miss America pageant.

Personally, I don’t have any opinion on what Sanders looks like – it’s her actual work that has condemned her to my mind. She has encouraged the worst instincts in people across this country and we are the poorer for her having been allowed to hold a position she had neither the competence nor the character to fulfill.

But Fox News does have opinions on what they want their female personalities to look like. Or did we just imagine all the sexist games they’ve played with the table fronts that get pulled off when the women are sitting, and all the behind-the-scenes behavior that only partly has come to light?

We’ll have to see if anyone left in the Pence White House’s depleted Dept of Defense is able to hold the John Boltons and their superfans like Tom Cotton back from starting a war in the Middle East. It doesn’t look like it, but you never know.

What we do know is that the Pence White House is hell bent on getting into a full military showdown with Iran as soon as possible – because they’re hoping they can play the card of fooling the country into re-electing them under the flag of “We’re at war, we better keep the guys who are in office and not change horses in the middle of the race!”

This is based on their terror at actually needing to run for re-election knowing how weak and unpopular they are across the country. Anything that will be a big distraction is a good idea to them – and yes, even if that means that thousands of young Americans die in the process.

My hope is that the continuing skepticism from the rest of the country and the world will restrain the actual Defense personel from automatically doing what these war-fanners demand of them.

A few thoughts:

1. Assuming that the 2-3 million active Dem voters across the swing states who stayed home in 2016 have learned their lesson from our current mess, the Pence White House and its sycophants will hopefully be sent packing next year. If that happens, and it’s a big IF, then this entire notion is moot. For all our sakes, I hope that is the case.

2. We need to keep in mind that Mike Pence ALREADY IS THE ACTING PRESIDENT. This is commonly known in DC and by anyone paying even mild attention to what is going on in the nation’s capitol. We know that the deal offered to any potential VP for Trump was that they would handle all the domestic and foreign policy (ie do all the work of being President). When John Kasich was offered this deal by the Trumps, he famously asked what the heck Trump would be doing and was told “he’ll be out making America great again.” And it’s obvious from the people who are getting picked for all the judiciary spots (all VERY FAR RIGHT) and from the deliberate gutting of the Cabinet (from the FAR RIGHT notion that we really shouldn’t have a Cabinet anyway) and from the vindictive approach to raising taxes on Blue States and Middle Class employees while slashing them for the wealthy, that Pence is making the decisions. True, he does need to deal with his childish spokesman making embarrassing comments and sometimes contradicting his policies, but that usually passes quickly. Pence is the man for the Right Wing and the GOP, and they’re fully aware he’s already getting it done for them. They’re fine to have Trump take all the attention and distract everyone, so long as they keep getting those policies and those lifetime court picks.

I’ll say it again, and I’ll keep repeating it every time this discredited impersonator of a journalist rears her head on any media: Sara Carter is NOT a journalist. She is a Right Wing conspiracy theory monger. She got her start by fomenting lies about the convicted former Border Patrol agents Ramos & Compean, where she tried to invent a story to clear them of the attempted murder that they had committed. This got her a lot of attention on AM Radio and Fox News in the latter 2000s, and she parlayed that into her current situation where she is paid big bucks to continue the mongering and fomenting.

By the way, she tries to present herself as “Award Winning”. Let’s take a closer look at that. She claims two National Headliner awards from the Press Club of Atlantic City – both for anti-immigrant stories she wrote to play up the notion of immigrants being gang members and the border being a toxic, dangerous place where all sorts of Right Wing paranoia are justified. Then she picked up a California Newspaper Publishers award for running a story about school districts wasting taxpayer dollars – this time playing the Right Wing agenda of portraying government as being inept and wasteful (and encouraging the reader to think of teachers and school administrators as unworthy of tax dollars in the first place). And she picked up a Society of Professional Journalists award for more stories about gang wars on the US/Mexico border, again intended to play up the Right Wing paranoia about the border and the immigrants crossing it.

She has the gall to brag about her lies in the Ramos & Compean fiasco on her webpage, never once admitting that she obfuscated the actual facts and played on the emotions of gullible Right Wingers listening to this story on AM radio. She also tries to play that she, by herself, got the two attempted murderers’ sentences commuted. I suppose that means all the angry Right Wing radio shouters were just assisting her. And note that the attempted murderers were not pardoned – they just were allowed to go home, with felony records.

It’s frankly amazing that Hannity and Fox News believe that people have memories this short.

Beck was in freefall long before the Pence White House began its campaign for office. Let’s be honest – the man got himself bounced off Fox News for being too much of a wingnut. That’s a story in and of itself.

As for Levin, his sordid history speaks for itself. He’s one of those guys who thinks if he shouts louder, he’ll sound more convincing. The problem is that he simply doesn’t have any case to make. I tend to ignore him, as a general principle about dealing with trolls.

I strongly suspect that Morris is not telling all that is prompting this resignation. He’s marketed himself for over a decade as this pious commentator. Nobody walks away from that unless there’s a serious situation happening. This is the old line about “wanting to spend more time with his family”. It usually means something quite different.

Let’s not forget Hannity’s fourth horseman, the ever earnest Gregg Jarrett. He of the repeated nonsensical legal claims about Trump and Clinton and whatever else goes through his mind.

Of the others, I’ll simply point out for the 1145th time that Sara Carter got her start in Right Wing media by peddling the Ramos & Compean propaganda back in the late 2000s. Ramos & Compean were Border Patrol officers who fired fifteen shots at a fleeing suspect, with one shot (from Ramos) hitting the guy in the rear end. They then covered up the shooting by throwing away their shell casings and asking their fellow officers not to report it. Sadly for them, the suspect’s mother was friendly with the mother of someone in Internal Affairs for the Border Patrol in Texas. One thing led to another, and these two guys lied their way into being on trial for attempted murder. When they were sentenced to prison terms, Sara Carter tried to turn the story into something completely different – portraying them as heroes of the border who were being unjustly prosecuted and persecuted. Of course, she could only do this by deliberately omitting most of the facts from the discussion. And this has continued to be her m.o. for over a decade. Carter is not just a dubious, shoddy “journalist”. She’s a despicable person who has tried to profit from the misery of others.

Solomon, for his part, is a propagandist, and he normally makes no bones about that. It’s been fun to watch Hannity breathlessly vamp about the “big breakthrough story” that Solomon is going to present him, only to see that it’s yet another irrelevant email about normal FBI procedure that the two guys are frantically trying to gaslight. Which has of course been Hannity’s approach throughout the scandals of the incompetent Pence White House.

Day in, day out, Hannity and his propagandists keep repeating the same talking points and gaslighting – that somehow the entire investigation was because of a dossier personally generated by Hillary Clinton somehow. When in reality, the investigation was triggered by the actual criminal behavior of multiple Trump and Pence associates, and the dossier in question was not the basis for the eventual arrests and prosecutions.

And even past that, Hannity has never once admitted that most of the material in the dossier has actually held up as factual – in that the elements that could be proven have been proven – and that the actual funding of the team to create it was started by the Far Right Washington Free Beacon. But I suppose that this is the very nature of “alternative facts” as now are relied upon by Fox News and its fan base.

Chris Wallace blew any credibility he might have had as the son of the great Mike Wallace when he humiliated himself trying to “gotcha” Bill Clinton in his infamous 2006 interview attempt. I frankly doubt any legitimate news agency would want him after that smirking performance. It is thus not surprising that he basically let Graham slide here.

I agree with Ellen that he only asked the one timid question as a way to provide a little more tape backup for the fun that will happen as soon as the Pence White House is shown the door, hopefully in early 2021. Wallace is hoping he can show clips like this and pretend that he was a lone voice of reason and sobriety alongside maybe Shepard Smith when the Right Wing and Fox News are called to account for their cheerleading of viciousness for the past several years. But as Ellen makes clear, Wallace really doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on.

As for Lindsey Graham, he’s sadly thrown away what little credibility he had. The same man who properly noted the undesirability of both Ted Cruz and Donald Trump will end his career as a sycophant to both. A truly despicable way to close out his political career.

If Buttigieg had a little humor about it, he would inform Fox that he needs to reschedule the town hall for Monday, so he would be able to answer Trump’s usual misstatements, and so that Fox News could run promos and chyrons about Buttigieg throughout Trump’s rant.

But the better course of action is simpler. Buttigieg should cancel this event and set a different one on CNN. If Fox News has questions, they can ask Scott Wiener in San Francisco and he’ll remind them “Fox News is not real news, and you’re not a reporter.”

Just to make sure people don’t get fooled by Hume’s nonsense – his estimate of “60 million human lives” is complete invention. Is he including the fetuses who had no chance to survive? Is he including every single woman who took a “morning after” pill? Where is he getting this other than his own hatred for women having the ability to determine their own destinies? And just so people are fully aware – women having a medical procedure is not a “staggering total of loss of human life” – it’s an affirmation that women in this country still have the right to seek medical help for their own bodies rather than needing to just do what their husbands or rapists tell them to do.

As far as his vicious swipe at Planned Parenthood, they actually do a fair amount to help women with the issues of parenthood, including all kinds of screens and tests that actual women find medically necessary and in fact life-saving.

As for his nonsense about Griswold v Connecticutt (which he’s repeated a bunch of times on Fox News and it’s been false every time he’s said it), the “right to privacy” was not “invented”. That’s a complete, utter falsehood and Hume knows it. In fact, the Griswold decision was discussed at the Earl Warren Supreme Court in 1968 with a specific reference to whether the constitution allows for privacy – and the 7 justices who agreed on this (including Byron White!) noted that you find that understanding in areas of the Bill of Rights like the freedom from improper searches. If you had no right to privacy, then any search could be conducted and you would have no recourse. With that right, the authorities can’t just bulldoze into your place. It’s why we have things called WARRANTS which judges have to approve. So there is an understood right to privacy that is found in the Constitution. Which is why the 1973 case of Roe, discussed at the Warren Burger Supreme Court goes with that right to also note that women have the right to deal with internal medical matters without having states and localities get into their business. This is something that most conservatives used to understand as a matter of keeping the government “out of our bedrooms”. But with the evangelical group and the deplorables now ruling the GOP, they appear to have forgotten that and are now trying to eliminate the notion that anyone has a right to privacy.

Kilmeade and Fox News had better be very careful about inciting violence, as Bill O’Reilly did to his shame. O’Reilly’s actions left him without any ability to cite any moral high ground for the rest of his life, and decent people have shunned him since then. He continues to flail around on his website, frantically podcasting from his home and groveling before marginal Right Wingers he used to sneer at, but he certainly hasn’t achieved the “Elder Statesman” role he had so desperately coveted.

In the case of Kilmeade and the other propagandists at Fox News, their actions and words speak for themselves. If something happens to Northam because of this propaganda, they’ve opened themselves up to significant legal peril. (And unlike the nonsensical suits filed by the Right Wing Sandmann family, this litigation would be based on actual malicious behavior by Fox News.)

You’d think the Right Wing would be happily celebrating their imminent victory over women and Roe. But no, they’re as angry and vicious as ever.

And here goes Fox News again, proving San Francisco State Senator Scott Wiener correct again, from when he noted “Fox News is not real news and you’re not a journalist” to one of their lackeys.

Northam, for all his faults, did not misspeak – his comments were taken badly out of context, and he repeatedly made clear what he was discussing. The problem is that Fox News and angry Right Wingers on AM Radio openly lied about what Northam said and why. Even after he publicly shamed Fox News for this propaganda attack, they ignored him and continued lying about it. This action is one that will be remembered for decades after the Pence White House is voted out of office, hopefully as soon as next December – and the Right Wing will not be able to walk this stuff back. They’ll have to live with the consequences of their viciousness.

As for Roe, it’s only a matter of time before the Roberts SC guts it. Even if the swing state Dems have learned their lesson about showing up for elections, we’re still stuck with the fact that the Right Wing stole two SC seats and rammed complete craven partisans into those slots. We’re just standing by now to hear the inevitable resignation from Clarence Thomas within the next year. But the Right Wing has the votes they need right now to do a massive amount of damage. And even if Thomas refuses to resign, the Right will have those votes at least for another 3 years, which will allow all these various cases to get to the current SC and reach the outcome they want.

I note that Dean Cain was frantically repeating the usual Right Wing talking points about States’ Rights with his constant refrain about how the Georgia law was “the choice of Georgia’s voters”. He’s not doing this by accident. The intent behind all the various anti-women bills being rammed through these gerrymandered legislatures has been to play the State’s Rights card when going to the SC hearing. And the Georgia law actually provides three different avenues of approach, so it’s useful for any of three different rulings we can expect from the Roberts SC. The first ruling, which should come down within a year regarding the Louisiana clinic restrictions, will be exactly on the grounds Cain was asserting. Namely, that under States’ Rights, each state can prevail within its borders to make its own choices about whether they wish to pass laws of this or any other kind. Idea being that the people who live in that state made this choice by electing their representatives, and they have a right to choose their own destiny, etc. Those who disagree can always change the laws by electing different representatives, right? So with that ruling, Roberts won’t completely overturn Roe, but he’ll allow the states to put whatever wild limits they wish into play. Which will obviate the 2016 Hellerstadt decision and allow most of the “zombie laws” to go into effect for the most part across these various states. And now Roberts will have his new precedent to follow.

The second ruling, which will come under one of these more recent state laws, will be about the criminality decision. Roberts being a careful man, he won’t want to immediately deal with the state laws that assign bold criminal penalties at the same time he’s just settling that they can write the laws their voters prefer. But in the second case – possibly the Kentucky one or the Georgia one or the Alabama one, Roberts will be able to extend the first ruling to also note that certain states and counties (or parishes) across the USA have their own specific criminal statutes. In Utah, for example, alcohol is tightly regulated and there are serious penalties for breaking those laws. So with the second ruling, Roberts and the other Right Wingers will be able to cite their new precedent and add the notion that criminal penalties can indeed be assigned.

And then we get to the third ruling, which both the Georgia and Alabama laws are designed to generate – that being this entire notion of “personhood” from within the womb simply because the developing fetus is indicating a heartbeat. With the new precedents in hand, Roberts will be able to note that multiple states across the country are raising this “difficult question”, and that we should remember that the constitution does provide all people with “certain inalienable rights”, and that these rights extend to everyone. Which will then allow Roberts to rule that science establishes the growing fetus has rights – which will then toss out the rest of Roe. We shouldn’t expect this third ruling to come before the next actual president takes office, hopefully in 2021, but that president will be unable to stop it from coming down.

I note that this is but ONE area where the Roberts Supreme Court will be issuing extremely destructive rulings. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of others. Elections Have Consequences.

Oh boy. Here we have a program hosted by active hater Mark Levin, with a guest who is a noted member of hate groups himself. John Eastman was named the Chairman of the “National Organization for Marriage”, an anti-gay hate group, in 2011. He is a failed candidate for AG in California, where he badly lost in 2010 and did not even qualify for the general election. He had previously lost in an attempt to run for the House in California in 1990, where he was decidedly trounced. (After losing that race, he went to law school and then made a point of clerking for Clarence Thomas to boost his credentials.) So it’s no surprise that Levin would turn to a Far Right guy like Eastman to buttress his already-prepared hypothesis.

Eastman is NOT a constitutional expert to anyone who actually understands the document. He’s just a Far Right crank who gets trotted out from time to time by other cranks who hope nobody has looked up Eastman’s lack of credentials.

Nearly everything Eastman states in this interview is just a regurgitation of talking points already voiced on Fox News and AM radio. And he ignores how the Pence White House has repeatedly pushed their agenda through Executive action – including the illegal attempt to re-route funding to the nonsense “wall” project and the vicious policies enacted toward refugees. I will allow that President Obama also used Executive Orders, although it was clear at the time that he was doing so specifically because angry Right Wingers in Congress had made clear that they would obstruct every single thing he attempted to do. President Obama’s work was toward accomplishing things that actually were meant to help people. Acting President Pence’s work has been malicious – intended to attack various groups head-on.

I’m frankly amazed that Levin still has an audience for his viciousness, but he somehow does. It has allowed him to purchase the failing “media empire” of Glenn Beck, although one suspects this may not be a long-term solution for either of them.

This is the first time Warren has said something that has my complete agreement and approbation. She is absolutely correct in her assessment. No sane Democratic candidate should go anywhere near a propaganda outlet like Fox news, at least not willingly.

I frankly wish Warren had spoken like this rather than dignifying the nonsense attacks on her ethnicity earlier.

Mike Lindell has more than a little ‘splaining to do for his employees and his customers. The employees he just mass fired were a big part of his production group, as he’s going from 90% production 10% shipping to 50% each. Which tells us that his sales have not been what he’d hoped. And there’s that inconvenient fact about how his Better Business Bureau situation has gone from a good rating and a grade of A+ to having his accreditation pulled and his grade dumped to an F.

This would seem to be a contradiction for Lindell, who has tried to play the Right Wing card about how wonderful this economy supposedly is for everyone, and how he thinks the Pence White House is just a gift to the business community and to everyday shoppers. Except that he’s unable to sell his pillows, and I’d guess that part of the reason is that his middle class customers have been facing higher tax bills and more uncertainty in the “gig economy”. And there was that issue with the Pence Treasury Dept having the IRS goose everyone’s withholding and thus generate large bills for many people or at least wipe out their usual refunds. So it doesn’t sound like everything is peaches and cream for Lindell’s customers, which would indicate it’s not peaches and cream for Lindell – and thus he’s had to fire a bunch of his employees.

I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for Lindell to admit his mistakes here. But the fact that he’s having to tighten his belt in the midst of this wonderful Right Wing Pence presidency speaks volumes by itself.

The irony about Biden and Thomas is that the Right Wing has spent the past few years fixating on the non-existent “Biden Rule” as their supposed justification for thumbing their nose at Merrick Garland’s nomination in 2016. Joe Biden gave a floor speech in the Senate in 1992 after the viciousness that surrounded the Thomas hearings, where he noted that it might be prudent to wait until after the 1992 election to go through that process again, if any such nomination should come up. Angry Right Wingers have asserted this speech to mean that Biden was somehow establishing a whole new “Rule” that they could then cite nearly 25 years later to justify their obstinence.

If you actually watch his full remarks, however, you’ll find that he actually didn’t establish any rule, and he qualified his statements. He made clear that his first recommendation was specifically in the case of George HW Bush playing the same belligerent game he played in throwing Thomas at the Senate. Bush had not, Biden noted, followed the normal process of “Advise and Consent” – choosing instead to just bully the Senate. Bush was quoted at the time in the press, saying that if the Senate didn’t confirm Thomas, he’d nominate someone they’d like a lot less. Biden’s response to the whole thing was to say that if Bush was going to behave like a child, it would be better to leave that until after all the election theatrics were finished. Biden also chided Democrats for assuming that a Republican like Bush would ever appoint a nominee like Thurgood Marshall. And Biden then went on to say that if Bush was planning to follow the regular course of business, the Senate would be fine to consider his nominees. So the actual floor speech plays very differently than the Right Wing would have you believe, which isn’t much of a surprise, to be honest. (And by the same examination, remarks made by Chuck Schumer in 2007 to the American Constitution Society go down the same logical path. Schumer noted that John Roberts and Samuel Alito both lied in their testimony before the Senate, and that if nominees and the W/Cheney White House were going to do so, it would be best to hold off any further lie-fests til after the 2008 election. But he also noted that if Cheney was going to behave himself, the nominees would of course be considered, as usual.)

As for Biden allowing Thomas to get onto the Supreme Court when he was obviously a terrible choice, frankly worse than Robert Bork in many ways, that can be attributed to the usual Democratic Party weakness. Biden was trying to play fair with George HW Bush, under the old “gentlemen’s agreement” idea of the Senate. He was trying to acknowledge that Bush had the right to make appointments and to show that the Dems would play ball. This is the same near-sightedness that led President Obama to repeatedly reach out to angry Right Wingers through his two terms, only to have them slam the door on his fingers. Increasingly over the last 25 years, angry Right Wing Republicans have played hardball whenever possible with their Democratic fellows in government. And the Dems have regularly been as conciliatory and friendly as they could be. Which has led us to where we are today. At least the current batch of Democratic Senators had the spine to say no to both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, even if they had no actual power to stop either nomination.