Archived threads in /news/ - Current News - 45. page

This Wray guy is a long time Trump stooge. he cannot be allowed to become FBI director.

>>156556
The FBI directer serves at the pleasure of the president I see no problem here.

He is also in favor of torture of Islamic Terrorists.
What and ugly, evil man.

>Trump is working to remove the U.S. from the international treaty to address potentially ruinous climate change. White House officials have initiated a process of withdrawal from a signed treaty, which isn’t expected to conclude until November 2020, near when Trump could be re-elected. Trump has said he’s open to re-negotiating U.S. carbon reduction commitments, but that the current treaty imposes intolerable financial burdens on Americans.

>The landmark 2015 Paris agreement commits the United States to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.

>Governors of New York, California and Washington formed the climate alliance after Trump last month announced he’d back the United States out of global efforts to address climate change by cutting carbon pollution. Carbon dioxide is a main greenhouse gas that traps heat, changing the climate. Other states joining the movement to exceed Paris targets include Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Virginia.

>Denver Mayor Michael Hancock and others around the nation have joined the effort, including leaders of small towns such as Wray.

>The alliance’s goal is to boost climate programs, share information and best practices and implement new programs to cut carbon emissions from all sectors of society.

>Hickenlooper’s order set the overall greenhouse gas reduction goal of at least 26 percent by 2025 and also a target of cutting carbon emissions from electricity generation by 25 percent by 2025 and 35 percent by 2030 – measured against 2012 levels. In Colorado, 55 percent to 60 percent of electricity currently comes from burning coal.

>The order commits state agencies to work strategically with utilities on a voluntary basis to maximize use of renewable energy without increasing costs to taxpayers. It calls for a statewide electric vehicle plan by 2018.

>Hickenlooper said Colorado will establish “charging corridors” along highways “to reduce range anxiety” – the fear among electric vehicle drivers that their batteries will die before they reach destinations. “You’ll be able to drive an electric car from Colorado to the Pacific, and from Denver to Moffat County without fear,” he said.

>The Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment now must develop a system for tracking greenhouse gas emissions, Hickenlooper said. And mining communities affected by a shift away from coal production will receive increased support for training displaced workers and increasing broadband communications connections.

>The order “is not a mandate” with requirements for utilities, Hickenlooper said. “We’re really trying to build a collaborative framework…… These are market forces. This is not government imposing a regime…… This is the future of jobs for our kids and for our grandkids.”

>He said Colorado already has cut greenhouse gas emissions by thousands of tons per year and called such efforts essential to an economy increasingly dependent on a pristine natural environment. “This is our foundation. We want to keep building on it and create jobs that can’t be exported overseas.”

>Environment groups and Democrat lawmakers swiftly applauded the action.

>“A real leadership move,” Western Resource Advocates president Jon Goldin-Dubois said, pointing to climate-driven impacts of droughts and intensifying wildfires that are “daily occurrences here in the West.”

>Colorado Mining Association president Stan Dempsey questioned Hickenlooper’s assertion that shifting off coal as a source of electricity in favor of wind, natural gas and solar sources is a matter of tapping into economic “market forces.” Dempsey pointed out that the booming wind and solar energy industries benefit from federal government subsidies. “The only way this will be done,” he said of meeting the carbon emissions cuts, “is pure muscle – forcing things at the Public Utilities Commission. What coal-fired power plants and electricity generating stations are going to be affected?”

>But fossil fuels industries also benefit from government support, Conservation Colorado director Pete Maysmith countered.

>The Trump administration’s posture against international efforts to slow climate change does not reflect the will of the people and economic momentum in western states, Maysmith said.

>“The nation actually is moving the other direction,” he said. “You now have governors and mayors saying it is wrong to walk away from the Paris agreement.”

>ASHCROFT, B.C. - Angie Thorne hugged her granddaughter as she looked for the first time at the blackened pit where her home of 21 years had stood just days earlier.

>She and a caravan of friends and family drove up to the Ashcroft Indian Reserve on Sunday to see what remained after a wildfire engulfed the community in central British Columbia, just west of Kamloops.

>"We made many memories here," Thorne said, falling silent as tears streamed from behind her sunglasses.

>She gestured to where she and her husband celebrated their silver wedding anniversary the summer before, then pointed out the lopsided picnic table her sons built 15 years earlier, somehow untouched by the flames.

>"Everybody complained about it and it's still sitting there," she said, letting out a laugh.

>"You couldn't get in or out of it. But they built it so we kept it, because that's what we do, right?"

>Most of the homes on the reserve were destroyed by the Ashcroft wildfire, one of hundreds still burning out of control across the province's southern and central Interior.

>More than 7,000 people had been ordered to evacuate by Sunday evening, and emergency officials predicted that number would likely rise as gusty winds and hot, dry conditions continue to fan the flames of more than 220 fires that have destroyed an area covering at least 230 square kilometres.

>Late Sunday, an evacuation order was issued for 100 Mile House, home to more than 1,500 people.

>Back at Thorne's property in Ashcroft, her granddaughter at one point let out a squeal: "Mittens!"
The family's seven-month-old cat had survived, her blackened whiskers singed and curled from the heat.

>"Bigger and better, eh babe?" Thorne said to her husband, surveilling the damage.

>He squeezed her shoulder: "We'll rebuild."

>>155750
The forests are supposed to burn periodically. This is the result of supressing the natural order of the forest for this long.

>>155791
If only humans could learn to live in balance with nature.

One source familiar with Justice's criminal probe said investigators doubt Russian operatives controlling the so-called robotic cyber commands that fetched and distributed fake news stories could have independently "known where to specifically target … to which high-impact states and districts in those states."

All of the sources spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation, led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, is confidential.

Top Democrats on the committees investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election have signaled the same.

Schiff said he wants the House panel to determine whether Trump aides helped Russia time its cyberattacks or target certain voters and whether there was “any exchange of information, any financial support funneled to organizations that were doing this kind of work.”

Trump son-in-law Kushner, now a senior adviser to the president and the only current White House aide known to be deemed a “person of interest” in the Justice Department investigation, appears to be under the microscope in several respects. His real estate finances and December meetings with Russia’s ambassador and the head of a sanctioned, state-controlled bank are also being examined.

Kushner’s “role as a possible cut-out or conduit for Moscow’s influence operations in the elections,” including his niche overseeing the digital operations, will be closely looked at, said the source knowledgeable about the Justice Department inquiry.

Kushner joined Donald Trump Jr. and Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort at a newly disclosed June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in New York.. The meeting, revealed by The New York Times, followed emails in which Trump Jr. was told the lawyer for the Russian government would provide him with incriminating information on Clinton and he replied “If it’s what you say I love it.”

That disclosure could only serve to heighten interest in whether there was digital collaboration.

Mike Carpenter, who in January left a senior Pentagon post where he worked on Russia matters, also has suspicions about collaboration between the campaign and Russia’s cyber operatives.

“There appears to have been significant cooperation between Russia’s online propaganda machine and individuals in the United States who were knowledgeable about where to target the disinformation,” he said, without naming any American suspects.

Trump has repeatedly repudiated or equivocated about the finding of four key intelligence agencies – the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency and the Directorate of National Intelligence – that Russian cyber operatives meddled with the U.S. election.

Last Friday, during their first face-to-face meeting, Trump questioned Putin about Russia’s role in the election meddling and Putin denied culpability, said Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who was present. Trump then said the two countries should find ways to move forward in their relationship, Tillerson said.

A Russian official who was at the meeting said the two sides agreed to form a working group to address cybersecurity, including interference in other countries’ internal affairs. However, Trump backtracked Sunday night, saying in a tweet that he doesn’t believe such an effort can happen.

As more has been learned about the breadth of the Russian cyber onslaught, congressional Democrats have shown growing resolve to demand that the Republican-controlled intelligence committees fully investigate ways in which Trump associates may have conspired with the Russians.

Among other things, congressional investigators are looking into whether Russian operatives, who successfully penetrated voting registration systems in Illinois, Arizona and possibly other states, shared any of that data with the Trump campaign, according to a report in Time.

“I get the fact that the Russian intel services could figure out how to manipulate and use the bots,” Virginia Sen. Mark Warner told Pod Save America recently. “Whether they could know how to target states and levels of voters that the Democrats weren’t even aware (of) really raises some questions … How did they know to go to that level of detail in those kinds of jurisdictions?”

The Russians targeted women and African-Americans in two of the three decisive states, Wisconsin and Michigan, “where the Democrats were too brain dead to realize those states were even in play,” Warner said.

Twitter’s and Facebook’s search engines in those states were overwhelmed, he said, meaning they couldn’t discern fake news from real news.

“On your news feed, you suddenly got … ‘Hillary Clinton’s sick’ or ‘Hillary Clinton’s stealing money from the State Department,’” said Warner.

It started even before Trump locked up the nomination. Throughout the Republican primary elections in early 2016, Russia sent armies of bots carrying pro-Trump messages and deployed human “trolls” to comment in his favor on Internet stories and in social media, former FBI special agent Clint Watts told Congress weeks ago.

Watts, now a cybersecurity specialist with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said the targets included former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham.

As Donald Trump was locking up the Republican presidential nomination in May 2016, a U.S. intelligence intercept picked up Russians discussing ways to spread news damaging to Clinton, two people familiar with the matter said.

No one has proved that Russia’s attack influenced the vote count in the Nov. 8 general election., but it wouldn’t have taken much to tip the results and change the course of history.

>>156302
If we want to eradicate ISIS we're going to have to send a lot more than that. It's good to see we're getting serious about this though.

>>156303
>we want to eradicate ISIS

just call cia agents back off..

>>156302

old news

>In an interview with POLITICO in September, White proposed establishing a "blue ribbon commission" to relitigate climate science, underscoring her unorthodox belief that the science showing human-induced climate change is unsettled.

>The commission, she said, would develop an "alternative scientific methodology" to the IPCC, whose usefulness she said has "reached its peak.”

>If nominated, White would likely be an advocate within the administration of reopening the foundation of Obama's climate change agenda: EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding,” a scientific conclusion that greenhouse gases constitute a threat to public health or welfare.

>Trump told an industry-backed think tank last year that he will “review” the endangerment finding, a potentially difficult task given the scientific consensus on the issue. Any withdrawal of the finding would be challenged by environmentalists in court.

>Pruitt has so far declined to reopen the endangerment finding, a decision that has infuriated some of Trump's conservative supporters.

>White would be able to play a key role in shaping the Trump administration's overall approach to climate change, and she has been clear that she does not think the issue should be addressed by EPA. In 2015, she argued that Obama's rules to limit carbon emissions from power plants marked "an unprecedented expansion of federal administrative power" with "no measurable climate benefits.” And last May, she urged House Speaker Paul Ryan to pass a bill that would block EPA from regulating carbon dioxide, methane, hydrofluorocarbons or other greenhouse gases.

>At CEQ, White could direct other agencies to turn their attention away from climate change, and she would be in charge of implementing recent executive orders on energy development and regulatory streamlining. Last month, Trump ordered the council to revoke recently issued guidance directing all federal agencies to consider climate change when they conduct environmental reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act, a decision that would be difficult to challenge in court. And in January, the president told CEQ to come up with a plan to expedite environmental reviews for major infrastructure projects.

>While environmentalists have long accused GOP officials of dragging their feet on climate change, White is by far the most outspoken critic of the underlying science — and the most ardent defender of fossil fuels — that Trump has considered to serve in his administration.

>In a 2014 blog post, White took aim at an article in The Nation by MSNBC host Chris Hayes, whose "recommendation to avert global warming, like most warmist policies, toys with the greatest advance made by mankind," she wrote. In White's view, there is a connection between “the abolition of slavery and humanity's first widespread use of energy from fossil fuels.” The rise of coal and oil, she argued, provided economic incentive to end the practice of slavery in the U.S. and elsewhere. (One critic fired back that the industrial revolution actually “exacerbated” slavery by increasing the demands for slave-produced goods such as cotton.)

>Putting a permanent CEQ chair in place would also raise the question of where Trump wants decision-making on environmental issues to happen — in the White House or at agencies.

>The Obama administration shifted major environmental responsibilities from CEQ to EPA and some other agencies as it sought aggressive action on climate change. It remains unclear whether Trump’s CEQ will continue in that vein or have a greater role in policymaking, though outside Republicans have encouraged Trump aides to grant the council wide latitude.

>The council was run from 2015 through the end of Obama's term by Christy Goldfuss, an unconfirmed managing director. Obama never nominated a replacement for his first CEQ chair, Nancy Sutley, who left in 2014.

>White’s criticisms of Obama environmental regulations go beyond climate change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7F9Oc6wA9pQ

This is the greatest thing I've read in awhile
Thank you op for breaking up the bullshit with this gem

>Florida

>Two Degrees

>A year and a half ago, the world agreed to limit warming to below 2°C under the Paris Agreement. A large part of being able to achieve this goal, however, relies on CCS technology.

>According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) most recent projections, reaching a 2°C goal requires widespread deployment of CCS combined with bioenergy. By 2050, the IPCC projects CCS to be responsible for cutting 14 percent of the world’s carbon emissions.

>As Glen Peters, senior researcher at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research-Oslo (CICERO) in Norway, told DeSmog UK: “[Climate] models really struggle to stay below 2°C without CCS. Without CCS, it costs a lot more to stay below 2°C, if you can even keep below that temperature.”

>Peters recently lead a study published in Nature Climate Change which found that the lack of development and deployment of CCS is the biggest challenge to meeting the Paris climate targets if countries failed to invest properly in CCS technology, limiting warming to “well below” 2°C might be impossible to achieve.

>IPCC scenarios look at CCS on fossil fuels (including coal), industry (such as cement) and bioenergy. And in all of these scenarios, Peters says, “CCS is used at scale”.

>“Some scenarios have CCS of about 40GtCO2/yr, or about the same magnitude of today’s CO2 emissions,” he says of the many, many different scenarios put together by the IPCC. “Some scenarios require scaling up with several, sometimes more than five, new CCS facilities every week for the rest of the century. This is large scale.”

>“Overall, CCS is rather critical to keep below 2°C,” he continues. “Whether this is the reality depends on the models, modelling assumptions, model structure, and so on. The [IPCC] models did not spend a huge amount of effort looking at ways to keep below 2°C with lower amounts of CCS.”

>“I would argue there is a large gap in the literature between no/low CCS and large-scale CCS as in the scenarios.”

>Without CCS combined with bioenergy, the IPCC warns mitigations costs “can increase substantially” adding that the longer mitigation is delayed, the higher these costs will rise.

>Ahead of the Paris climate conference in December 2015, 10 countries included using CCS as part of their strategy to cut emissions. This included China, Canada and Saudi Arabia.

>Currently there are 38 large-scale CCS projects dotted around the globe according to the Global CCS Institute. But the majority of these are pilot projects. Together, these projects can capture about 40 million tonnes of CO2 per year (Mtpa). Compare this to the International Energy Agency’s figures which show that nearly 4,000 Mtpa must be captured in 2040 to meet the 2°C goal and the scale of the challenge becomes clear.

>Scaling up

>CCS is nowhere near close to operating at this scale. The technology has a long history of struggling to get off the ground and many question how ‘clean’ it actually is when it comes to reducing emissions from fossil fuel power plants.

>In the UK, for example, there were two main CCS projects going forward in 2015 – Drax’s White Rose project and Shell’s Peterhead project. Both were finalists in the government’s CCS competition. However, in the run up to the COP21 Paris climate talks the competition’s £1 billion in funding was scrapped by the government and these projects came to a halt.

>A lot of hopes were therefore pinned to Southern’s Kemper project – it was among three much-anticipated upcoming projects highlighted by the Global CCS Institute in its latest report. It’s failure to deliver is therefore a blow to many people’s idea that we can both keep burning coal and meet our climate targets.

>As a Bloomberg editorial wrote: “‘Clean coal,’ always dubious as a concept and never proved as a reality, has now failed as a business proposition.”

>Even coal CEO Robert Murray, as E&E reported, admitted as much last week when he said: “Carbon capture and sequestration does not work. It’s a pseudonym for ‘no coal’. It is neither practical nor economic, carbon capture and sequestration. It is just cover for the politicians, both Republicans and Democrats that say, ‘Look what I did for coal,’ knowing all the time that it doesn't help coal at all.”

>So does this mean we should forget about CCS as a solution? As it turns out, it’s not as simple as this question might suggest.

>>155903
>>http://www.dailywire.com/

Redneck news.

https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/10783/could-this-study-totally-dismantle-global-warming-claims

>>155903
it was reviewed by peers who were selected for their disbelief in climate change or its danger to the earth.

The ODU professors, who stand by their work in the face of attacks from the left, concluded that in 2008 as few as 38,000 and as many as 2.8 million noncitizens voted.

Mr. Agresti’s analysis of the same polling data settled on much higher numbers. He estimated that as many as 7.9 million noncitizens were illegally registered that year and 594,000 to 5.7 million voted.

These numbers are more in line with the unverified estimates given by President Trump, who said the number of ballots cast by noncitizens was the reason he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton.

Last month, the president signed an executive order setting up a commission to try to find on-the-ground truth in illegal voting. Headed by Vice President Mike Pence, the panel also will look at outdated voter lists across the nation with names of dead people and multiple registrants.

For 2012, Just Facts said, 3.2 million to 5.6 million noncitizens were registered to vote and 1.2 million to 3.6 million of them voted.

Mr. Agresti lays out his reasoning in a series of complicated calculations, which he compares to U.S. Census Bureau figures for noncitizen residents. Polls show noncitizens vote overwhelmingly Democratic.

“The details are technical, but the figure I calculated is based on a more conservative margin of sampling error and a methodology that I consider to be more accurate,” Mr. Agresti told The Washington Times.

He believes the Harvard/YouGov researchers based their “zero” claim on two flawed assumptions. First, they assumed that people who said they voted and identified a candidate did not vote unless their names showed up in a database.

“This is illogical, because such databases are unlikely to verify voters who use fraudulent identities, and millions of noncitizens use them,” Mr. Agresti said.

He cites government audits that show large numbers of noncitizens use false IDs and Social Security numbers in order to function in the U.S., which could include voting.

Second, Harvard assumed that respondent citizens sometimes misidentified themselves as noncitizens but also concluded that noncitizens never misidentified themselves as citizens, Mr. Agresti said.

“This is irrational, because illegal immigrants often claim they are citizens in order to conceal the fact that they are in the U.S. illegally,” he said.

Some of the polled noncitizens denied they were registered to vote when publicly available databases show that they were, he said.

This conclusion, he said, is backed by the Harvard/YouGov study’s findings of consumer and vote data matches for 90 percent of participants but only 41 percent of noncitizen respondents.

As to why his numbers are higher than the besieged ODU professors’ study, Mr. Agresti said: “I calculated the margin of sampling error in a more cautious way to ensure greater confidence in the results, and I used a slightly different methodology that I think is more accurate.”

There is hard evidence outside of polling that noncitizens do vote. Conservative activists have conducted limited investigations in Maryland and Virginia that found thousands of aliens were registered.

These inquiries, such as comparing noncitizen jury pool rejections to voter rolls, captured just a snapshot. But conservatives say they show there is a much broader problem that a comprehensive probe by the Pence commission could uncover.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation, which fights voter fraud, released one of its most comprehensive reports last month.

Its investigation found that Virginia removed more than 5,500 noncitizens from voter lists, including 1,852 people who had cast more than 7,000 ballots. The people volunteered their status, most likely when acquiring driver’s licenses. The Public Interest Legal Foundation said there are likely many more illegal voters on Virginia’s rolls who have never admitted to being noncitizens.

>>150790
This is good.
As someone from California where illegals can vote because ids are racist, I support this.

>>156064
Any sources besides Wikipedia? Genuinely interested but I'm at work so I can't be bothered to do extensive research

>>156094
http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/628794/ISIS-al-Baghdadi-Iraq-US-Daesh-terrorism-Russia-Middle-East-Nineveh

>>156094
here's the reuters article:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-baghdadi-idUSKBN19W1AW

>Many posters have been defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti, including the words "stinking Jew" written in magic marker.

>Israel's ambassador to Hungary issued a statement denouncing the campaign, saying it "evokes sad memories but also sows hatred and fear", an apparent reference to Hungary's part in the deportation of 500,000 Jews during the Holocaust.

>But hours after the ambassador made his comments over the weekend, Israel's foreign ministry issued a "clarification" saying that Soros was a legitimate target for criticism.

>"In no way was the statement (by the ambassador) meant to delegitimize criticism of George Soros, who continuously undermines Israel's democratically elected governments," said foreign ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon, adding that Soros funded organizations "that defame the Jewish state and seek to deny it the right to defend itself".

I seriously have no clue who is jewing who anymore.

>support for democracy and humn rights
oh the horror
globalism run amok

>>156032
That's code for subverting white nations and implementing Communism. We all know it.

Why is it always Flordia?

>>155517
I think its the heat real talk.

>>155517
Immigrants

>>156099
Why investigate? He admitted he was the leaker.
Just take him out back and shoot him.

>>156100

His memos are missing.

>>156100

He is free to "leak" whatever he wants as long as it is not classified info.

He is free to put classified information in memos if he wants, as long as he doesn't allow folks without the proper security clearances access to them.

So far, there's absolutely 0 evidence that the memos he leaked contained classified information.

This effort contributed to the relatively large backlog of 107 vacancies on trial and intermediate-appellate courts that Trump inherited. That’s more than what awaited four of Trump’s five immediate predecessors, according to the public-affairs website Ballotpedia. Only President Bill Clinton had more initial vacancies, with 111. By contrast, Obama found only 54 lower-court vacancies when he took office, while President George W. Bush had 84. Trump’s starting batch of 107 represents 12 percent of all 890 federal judicial positions.

Those vacancies, and the ones to come as more judges retire (the number has already jumped to 136 in the six months since inauguration) offer Trump the chance to sculpt the courts to his liking. During the campaign, he said he would “appoint judges very much in the mold of Justice Scalia,” a forceful conservative who unexpectedly died in February 2016. Perhaps more than some of his liberal detractors gave him credit for, Trump, 71, understood the importance of the judiciary to Republicans who were reluctant to support him. “If you really like Donald Trump, that’s great, but if you don’t, you have to vote for me anyway,” he said at a rally in Iowa last July. “You know why? Supreme Court judges, Supreme Court judges.”

As a candidate, Trump relied on suggestions from two establishment conservative groups, the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society, to assemble a list of 21 potential high court picks. Gorsuch was on their list. Now Trump is pulling from the same compilation for his lower-court choices. One example is Allison Eid, whom Trump has nominated for the vacancy created by Gorsuch’s departure from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Denver. A member of the Colorado Supreme Court, Eid previously served as the state’s solicitor general and as a law clerk to the U.S. Supreme Court’s right-wing elder, Justice Clarence Thomas.

Conservatives applauded Eid’s selection in June, as well as those of 10 other lawyers, judges and scholars. “It’s a fantastic list,” Carrie Severino, chief counsel of the right-leaning Judicial Crisis Network, said in a post on the National Review’s Bench Memos blog. “Many of the nominees are well known in the conservative legal movement.” Trump so far has nominated 15 people to the lower courts, including Stephanos Bibas, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who clerked for the Supreme Court’s swing vote, Anthony Kennedy, and has argued several cases before the justices. Bibas is up for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia. Professor Amy Coney Barrett of the University of Notre Dame, who previously clerked for Scalia, was nominated for a seat on the the Seventh Circuit in Chicago.

Administration officials “know what they are looking for,” said Jonathan Adler, a conservative constitutional law professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. “Most of the appellate court nominees are current or former academics. That shows a desire for judges who will have an intellectual influence on the courts they’re placed on.” Noah Feldman, a liberal professor at Harvard Law School and Bloomberg View columnist, volunteered that “these are better picks than one might have expected—maybe better than one could have hoped.” Feldman attributed the quality of these early nominees to the administration’s having “outsourced judicial selection” to “elite conservative lawyers.”

Under Senate rules, confirming judicial nominations requires only a simple majority. That means Republicans need sway all but one of their 52-member caucus to push through a nominee, and even with just 50, they can count on Vice President Mike Pence as a tie-breaker.

It used to be that a Supreme Court nominee required 60 votes, but to guarantee Gorsuch’s ascension to what many Democrats bitterly considered Garland’s seat, McConnell exercised the so-called nuclear option, and changed the rule.

In the end, Gorsuch received three Democratic votes and was confirmed 54-45. The only other Trump nominee the Senate has voted on so far, Amul Thapar, a former federal trial judge, took a seat on the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati after being confirmed 52-44.

Despite Feldman’s muted assessment of Trump’s initial nominees, liberal activists sound glum. “The whole situation is worrisome,” said Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice in Washington. “We’re seeing nominees, including Gorsuch, who are going to turn back the clock on hard-fought rights and liberties.” The prospect of a Trump-shaped federal judiciary “is all the more critical now,” Aron added, “because the courts are the only institution that are providing a check against the administration’s more extreme policies.” As an example, she pointed to the ban on travel from six majority-Muslim countries, which several lower courts blocked before the Supreme Court last month largely reinstated it and agreed to hear arguments on its lawfulness come fall.

The narrow Senate majority currently held by Republicans doesn’t ensure confirmation of every Trump nominee, however. Two White House choices that have infuriated Democrats and could make moderate Republicans queasy are John Bush and Damien Schiff. Both men, who are scheduled for a vote before the Senate Judiciary Committee as soon as next week, have come under fire for hard-right views they’ve expressed as prolific bloggers.

Bush, 52, a Kentucky lawyer nominated to an appellate judgeship on the Sixth Circuit, posted (PDF) pseudonymously in 2008 that slavery and abortion have been “the two greatest tragedies in our country”