The Senate was rocked Tuesday afternoon by the announcement from the chief of staff to New Mexico Democrat Sen. Ben Ray Luján that the senator had suffered a stroke last Thursday, which required surgery to ease swelling on his brain. He has been hospitalized since. Luján is expected to make a full recovery, but as of now the timing of his return to Washington, D.C. is up in the air. That complicates a heck of a lot of things in a 50/50 Senate, not least of which is an upcoming Supreme Court vacancy to fill.

In the immediate term, it means the Commerce Committee is missing a critical vote, so key nominations to the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission (which, frankly, the Biden administration should have moved to fill months ago) are now on hold until Luján’s return. It also potentially complicates that Supreme Court vacancy, which is sucking up much of the Senate’s oxygen these days.

The Republicans huddled for lunch on Tuesday to try to determine a strategy for this potential nomination, which is another way of saying leadership is trying to make the racists in the Republican conference keep the racism down to a minimum. It’s not working thus far, with everyone from Susan Collins (ME) saying President Joe Biden’s intention to nominate a Black woman is “clumsy” to Roger Wicker (MS) calling it “affirmative action.” Of course, Judiciary Committee member John Kennedy (LA) wins the prize this week, turning his dog whistle in for a fog horn.

“No. 1, I want a nominee who knows a law book from a J. Crew catalog,” Kennedy said upon exiting the lunch. “No. 2, I want a nominee who’s not going to try to rewrite the Constitution every other Thursday to try to advance a ‘woke agenda.’”

So much for leadership trying to keep all that misogynistic racism behind closed doors. “I think some members of leadership think they can control what people want to talk about. I don’t agree with that proposition,” Kennedy told reporters. “I’m going to talk about what I want to talk about, and if they don’t like that, they can call somebody who cares.”

This, by the way, happened after he distinguished himself in committee Tuesday, asking Sunshine Suzanne Sykes—a California Superior Court judge who will be the state’s first Native American federal judge, and Kenly Kiya Kato, whose American parents were forced into Japanese internment camps during World War Two—“Do you think America is mostly good or mostly bad?” He also apparently didn’t read the agenda for this hearing, because he asked these two California district court nominees about their nominations to New York seats.

Sen. Mitch McConnell’s leadership team is trying hard to keep this from being a thing. He reportedly argued in the GOP’s luncheon Tuesday that the balance of the court isn’t going to be changed by this pick, so they shouldn’t be fighting it. Minority Whip John Thune (SD) argued that since they don’t have the votes to block this nominee anyway, it would be counterproductive to make a big deal out of it. It’s worth noting that that’s a rule McConnell only holds Democratic presidents to. He had no problem jamming Trump’s pick of anti-abortion “handmaid” of Christ Amy Coney Barrett into Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat.

Judiciary Committee member John Cornyn (TX) is going all in on that newfound principle, and echoing McConnell in an NBC News interview. “One reason I don’t think the Breyer replacement will be as controversial, potentially, is because it doesn’t alter the current balance of the court,” Cornyn said.

That’s after he spouted some casual racism: “I don’t understand why he put himself in a box by saying he’d only nominate an African American woman,” Cornyn said. “Maybe he made his bed and he’s going to have to lie in it.” Since he was starting to dig this hole, he just kept on. “It sends a bad message to other people that they can’t compete for a nomination—like an Asian or somebody else of a different race,” he said. “And it also diminishes the eventual nominee, because people will always suspect that they didn’t get the nomination because of merit.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Lindsey Graham is on a big campaign with Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn, a fellow South Carolinian, to convince Biden to nominate their home state candidate, J. Michelle Childs. “Three guys in pick-up trucks came up to me and said she ‘seems like a nice lady. I’m tired of this Harvard-Yale stuff.’ The great equalizer is the garbage dump because everybody’s got to throw out garbage,” Graham told Politico. “I was just struck by what they thought.” Whatever the hell that means. And that’s a plausible scenario! Three guys in pick-up trucks approaching him because they want to discuss Supreme Court nominees and where they went to college.

This kind of out-and-out campaigning for Childs from Graham is resulting in some deeper scrutiny of Childs than she might otherwise receive, and it’s not good for her candidacy. Her years working first as an associate and then as a partner at Nexsen Pruet Jacobs & Pollard have raised concern since the cases she took on were primarily in labor and employment law, and she worked principally on behalf of management and employers in these cases. She defended employers accused of racial discrimination, civil rights violations, and fighting unionization drives. In her current position as a district judge in South Carolina, her track record is against workers alleging discrimination.

Her record as a judge in criminal justice cases is also problematic. “On numerous occasions, Childs issued such punitive decisions on criminal justice issues that those rulings were eventually overturned on appeal by higher courts,” The Prospect’s Alexander Sammon reports. “Throughout the 2010s, a period where criminal justice reform was increasingly prioritized for activists and Democratic politicians alike, Childs ruled against both plaintiffs and defendants who alleged everything from excessive force by prison guards to ineffective legal counsel to sentencing errors.”

That her punitive rulings in criminal justice cases have been routinely overturned by higher courts suggests that she’s not such a careful jurist in making decisions. In one case, she dismissed a motion from Gerald Decosta Whaley, who had been convicted on drug charges, for his sentence to be vacated or reduced because he had inadequate legal representation. Childs dismissed the motion without even holding an evidentiary hearing. This brought a strong rebuke from the Fourth Circuit appeals court, which reversed Childs. The court found that Childs had “abused [her] authority” in dismissing the motion without even holding a hearing.

That’s not an aberration for Childs in criminal cases; her decisions have been routinely overturned on appeal. A district court judge who has such a losing track record in federal appeals courts on an issue as essential right now as criminal justice reform, on top of years of anti-labor litigation in private practice, makes her a great candidate for a Republican to tout. Not one for Biden to nominate.

In fact, Graham’s trolling here should be rejected out of hand. Even with Luján’s absence, a nominee from Biden can reach the 51-vote threshold. Childs should be reviewed, as should every qualified candidate, on her own merit and Biden’s stated objectives for this seat rather than whether a bipartisan confirmation could occur.