Senate Republicans have already gone too far in opposing President Obama's appointees, argues Gail Collins in the New York Times—but blocking someone over a boyfriend she had 20 years ago? Yes, Senate Republicans want to stop Mari Carmen Aponte from becoming ambassador to El Salvador because of a guy she once dated. Collins explains: "A defecting Cuban intelligence agent claimed in 1993 that Fidel Castro’s spies were trying to recruit Aponte" through her then-boyfriend, Roberto Tamayo.
Only problem: A former US spy says Tamayo was actually an FBI informant. "This sounds like a complicated boyfriend," Collins writes. "However, who of us does not have a difficult significant other in the distant past?" Collins suggests a 10-year moratorium on all sketchy exes. She also expresses amazement over Republicans' increasingly die-hard desire to block Obama appointees, especially Richard Cordray, would-be head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—because conservatives oppose the very powers of the bureau, "which the Senate approved, with some Republican support, a year and a half ago." (More President Obama stories.)