Todd Blanche needs nearly every Republican vote to become attorney general, and today he lost his second one. Lisa Murkowski says she’ll oppose him, joining whatever’s left of John Cornyn’s patience after two weeks of public irritation over Blanche’s IRS-immunity order for Trump. The Times notes he “likely cannot afford any other defections.” In a chamber this narrow, that sentence is carrying a lot of weight — it means one more senator having a bad week about this nominee ends the nomination.

What strikes me is who the defectors are. Cornyn isn’t running for reelection. Murkowski has never needed the MAGA base to survive; Alaska’s top-four primary and ranked-choice general effectively immunized her from a primary threat years ago, which is presumably why she was also willing to vote to convict Trump at his second impeachment when it cost most of her colleagues nothing to fold. Tillis had doubts too, and he’s out after this term. The pattern isn’t ideological. It’s actuarial — who still has to answer to a primary electorate, and who’s already paid that bill.

Which makes Senate opposition to a Trump nominee look less like a caucus and more like a retirement club. The people willing to say no are, with almost mechanical consistency, the ones who priced in the cost of saying no before they said it. Everyone else’s vote was spoken for the moment they decided to run again.

Meanwhile Fauci actually got held in contempt today, which I saw coming yesterday but is still worth sitting with — a subpoena with real teeth, aimed at a man whose main defense is a piece of paper issued by the same government now holding him in contempt. The vote was the easy part. Enforcement is where this gets interesting.

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