First, take a good, hard look at members’ meetings with Garland, which the White House is spinning as some brewing rebellion against leadership. As Republican staffers will tell you privately, this is the strategy that everyone—leadership, rank-and-file members, and even most outside groups—has settled on: Senators can sit down with the nominee for a chat, maybe even a cup of coffee and a nice pastry, so long as they stick to the party line that hearings are Not. Gonna. Happen. This is, in fact, the position that most members huddling with Garland have stuck to, including Kelly Ayotte, whose Monday announcement that she will meet with him on April 13 generated quite a bit of buzz. Embroiled in a high-stakes reelection race in the blue state of New Hampshire, Ayotte has been a prime target of pro-confirmation protesters. Even so, like Boozman and, more notably, Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (gatekeeper of Supreme Court hearings), she has stressed that her meeting with Garland is a gesture of “respect and courtesy”—and an opportunity to explain why she will not be supporting hearings. And lest anyone suspect him of being a squish, Boozman made sure to issue a statement immediately after his Garland meeting, assuring constituents that he remained unmoved.

As for the outliers, there are really only two: Susan Collins has gone rogue by supporting hearings and urging colleagues to meet with Garland, but that’s pretty much par for the course. The gal’s from Maine. What are you gonna do? Illinois’s Kirk, meanwhile, has been aggressively gigging his party brethren. On Wednesday, he issued a memo calling on the rest of the conference to follow his lead in meeting with Garland. Saucier still, in a local radio interview last month, he challenged colleagues to “man up and cast a vote.” But as Kirk likely knows better than anyone, neither Republican lawmakers nor outside groups are all that concerned about what he says or does, because they don’t expect him to be around much longer. Kirk is seen as on track to get his butt whipped by Democratic Representative Tammy Duckworth in November. (Last October, Politico reported that Kirk had already been “written off” by national party operatives.) He is desperately scrambling to salvage his seat by courting Democrats and Independents, but no one much thinks he’ll succeed, so there’s no reason to waste much energy on the guy at this point.

To clarify, Collins and Kirk are not the only Republicans to have expressed an openness to hearings. Back in February, Lisa Murkowski told Alaska reporters that she supported holding them for President Obama’s at that point still-hypothetical nominee. More recently, while home over Easter break, Jerry Moran told Kansans that he thought “the process ought to go forward.” And do you know what happened next? Conservative groups took out after Moran with the ferocity of coked-up wolverines. Public denunciations were issued, attack ads were readied, and a last-minute primary challenge was threatened. It took all of 11 days for a bruised and bleeding Moran to issue a statement reversing himself. In the aftermath of Moran’s beatdown, Murkowski’s office felt moved to assure The New York Times that she, too, had changed her mind about hearings.