Because Republicans hold a 53-47 advantage in the Senate, it will be difficult for Democrats to regularly defeat judicial nominations. But a clip of, for example, Missouri district court nominee Josh Divine trying to explain why he endorsed literacy tests for voting and analogized homosexuality to bestiality is the sort of thing that, if done correctly, would have a chance to go viral enough to get Susan Collins to have second thoughts.

The bad news is that no such clips exist, because when Senate Democrats had the chance to question the nominees in person, they decided they had other things to do or other places to be. Illinois’s Dick Durbin, California’s Adam Schiff, and Rhode Island’s Sheldon Whitehouse spent more of their allotted time lauding Federalist Society judges for sometimes ruling against Trump than they did asking questions of Whitney Hermandorfer, the pending nominee to the Sixth Circuit. Incredibly, their performances were still more impactful than those of Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal, New Jersey’s Cory Booker, Hawaii’s Mazie Hirono, and California’s Alex Padilla, who did not say anything to Hermandorfer at all.

Democratic politicians are fond of casting Trump as a threat to democracy and the rule of law, and are very aware of the power of political theater when they have new books to promote or campaign donations to solicit via lengthy, meme-laden, green-blubble text. But it is difficult for Senate Democrats to persuade voters to care about judicial confirmation battles when they, the Democrats, are so uninterested in fighting them.