On Oct. 28, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., was still the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee. Angered by Republicans’ peevish refusal to let President Obama fill the vacant Supreme Court seat of the late Antonin Scalia, he talked smack to the Huffington Post about his plans once he would preside over the U.S. Senate.

Kaine described how, after winning the upcoming election, he (as president of the Senate) and Minority Leader Harry Reid’s expected successor, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., would cut off the Republican minority at its knees if it tried to obstruct Hillary Clinton’s Supreme Court nominee. In the name of fulfilling the statute that says the Supreme Court has nine members, Kaine said that Senate Democrats would end the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, just as they had ended it for lower court and executive branch nominees three years earlier.