They’re the most junior Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee. But Kamala Harris and Cory Booker led the way in upending Brett Kavanaugh’s debut – and the GOP was watching with 2020 on its mind.

Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) was only 13 words into the Supreme Court confirmation proceeding before Harris calmly broke in first, saying that “we have not been given the opportunity to have a meaningful hearing.” Booker interrupted soon afterward, appealing to Grassley’s “sense of decency and integrity,” jumpstarting a current of Democratic disruption.

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It was a team effort by the minority, which planned the moment in advance as an alternative to a full-scale boycott of Kavanaugh’s hearing. But Harris and Booker’s key roles in the protest drew quick jabs from Republicans who were already preparing up to hit them as driven solely by their own potential White House runs in 2020.

Harris and Booker, the second and third African-American members ever to sit on the Judiciary panel, describe each other as friends and have only recently cracked the door open to presidential bids. Yet even before they leapt first into the fray, slamming the GOP for withholding hundreds of thousands of pages of Kavanaugh, Republicans were gearing up to portray the Democratic duo’s pushback as driven by their 2020 ambitions.

The Republican National Committee deployed a rapid-response effort spotlighting Harris and Booker’s status as White House contenders, accusing them of capitalizing on the moment to boost their own profiles. Senate Majority Whip Sen. John Cornyn on Tuesday night tweeted “All about 2020 presidential politics” with a link to an Associated Press story highlighting Booker, Harris and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn)’s role in the hearings. Booker already had riled Republicans for suggesting that backers of President Donald Trump’s nominee are “complicit in the evil” his ideology represents, July comments that Cornyn (R-Texas) and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) referenced anew on Tuesday.

“Instead of treating the judge’s hearing seriously, they’re going to soak up every minute of camera time to appeal to their far left base,” RNC spokesman Michael Ahrens said by email. “They’ve already said they’re voting no, so any faux outrage is obviously going to be about 2020.”

Other Republicans watched from afar, predicting that Harris and Booker’s leadership in the anti-Kavanaugh protest would backfire. One Senate GOP aide quipped that “two liberals trying to out-extreme one another on national television is Christmas in September,” while another warned that the disruptions would hurt vulnerable red-state Democrats: “They seem to be willing to sacrifice their endangered 2018 colleagues at the altar of their 2020 ambitions.”

Harris dismissed as “ridiculous” the suggestion that her vocal pushback against Kavanaugh stemmed from any attempt to burnish her own rising-star status in the party.

“We’re talking about the highest court in the land, and one of only nine people in the country who would serve in that position,” the first-term Democrat said in an interview. “And the significance of that nomination, then, to the lives of Americans, is profound. Everyone should take these hearings extremely seriously.”

This isn’t Harris’ first foray into high-profile hearings. Last year, she stoked 2020 speculation when she aggressively questioned Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and National Security Agency Director Adm. Mike Rogers during a hearing.

Indeed, she and Booker aren’t the only Democratic 2020 hopefuls whose vocal opposition to President Donald Trump’s second Supreme Court pick in two years is sparking jeers from the right. They’re not even the only potential presidential contender on the Judiciary dais: Klobuchar is also mentioned on some of the party’s short lists.

The conservative opposition research group America Rising compiled an emoji-studded checklist of “all the right boxes” that Harris, Booker, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) checked during Tuesday’s hearing, including “glad hand with the resistance” and “tally suck-ups from campaign operatives.”

Booker declined to discuss his party’s strategy, his own, or anything else as his party’s pivotal Kavanaugh moment played out on Tuesday.

“Oh brother, my head is too focused on the next step in all this,” he said in a brief interview.

But days before the hearing began, some of their Republican colleagues were already preparing for up-and-coming Democrats to use the moment to their advantage. “There are always people who want to make a show,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) told reporters. “And yeah, I expect we’ll see some of that.”

Ultimately, every minority member of the committee — from stalwart liberal Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut to deal-making moderate Chris Coons — aligned in their protest against Kavanaugh, a fact that Harris spokeswoman Lily Adams observed. “Every single Democrat objected to this hearing today, and rightfully so,” she said.

After the initial theater of Democratic disruptions cooled, and the 21 members of the Judiciary panel worked through their opening statements, Harris and Booker displayed some striking similarities in their opening statements. The committee’s two youngest Democrats both nodded to their historic presence as senators of color serving on the committee, Booker name-checking storied civil rights activism and Harris mentioning the Brown v. Board of Education ruling which helped provide “the opportunities that allowed me to become a lawyer or a prosecutor.”

Booker delivered longer remarks, however, while Harris kept hers more abridged with only a brief reference to Republican withholding of documents from Kavanaugh’s past. “I appreciate that I’m a bit of a trailblazer,” Booker joked as he sought to extend his time.

Tillis, the next senator to speak after Booker, offered his own attempt at humor to begin his opening statement: “I have a 12-minute preamble, and 18 minutes of comments.”

Burgess Everett contributed to this report.

Ahead of a marathon day of back-to-back congressional hearings Wednesday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey came to POLITICO’s offices to discuss Republican allegations that his company is biased, his own role in Twitter’s content decisions and the behind-the-scenes wrangling that preceded his appearance on the Hill.

Here are our main takeaways from the conversation.

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There’s a line Trump can’t cross — but it’s not clear where it is.

Is there anything that President Donald Trump could tweet that would be so abusive or violent that it would get him booted from Twitter? Dorsey said when it comes to Trump, “I do have notifications turned on for a number of accounts, including his,” but deferred on specifics to Twitter’s head of legal and policy Vijaya Gadde, who said the answer is “yes.”

While Trump’s tweets get considered under a company policy that weighs whether the behavior is “newsworthy or in the legitimate public interest,” the president could, in theory, go too far and get banned from the service, according to Gadde. But, she acknowledged that the company needs more clarity on what counts as “in the legitimate public interest.”

Dorsey denies personally calling the shots on Twitter bans.

The Twitter CEO said that while he gives input on whether users are violating the website’s rules, he doesn’t get involved in the final decisions on banning accounts.

“My role is to ask questions and make sure we’re being impartial and upholding consistently our terms of service, including [what’s in the] public interest,” he said.

He also denied a Wall Street Journal report that he overturned Twitter staff decisions and allowed far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and white supremacist Richard Spencer to remain on the service. Dorsey said he provided input on those decisions, but added, “I don’t think I’ve ever overruled” any one of them.

Any bias is unintentional and corrected, he said.

Dorsey rejected conservative complaints that Twitter is silencing their voices, saying “we write our policies and our rules and our enforcement guidelines with one single principle, which is impartiality,” and any allegations of biased decision-making are “false.”

Still, could there be unintentional bias shaping how decisions get made on Twitter? Dorsey allowed for it.

“It’s not an intentful bias that’s been injected. We are doing a lot of work to study bias within algorithms generally, and what might cause an outcome of bias towards one party or another, or one leaning or another, whether it be conservative or more liberal. That’s an active field of research. But the intention is impartiality,” he said, adding, “If we ever recognize an outcome that is not impartial, we fix it.”

Dorsey didn’t want to testify alone.

The Twitter CEO is set to testify solo before the House Energy and Commerce committee Wednesday over allegations that Twitter is biased against conservatives. But he says he didn’t want it that way.

During tense negotiations with the House panel, committee staff at one point held out the possibility of a subpoena for Dorsey. But Dorsey told POLITICO he resisted because he didn’t think it was right that Facebook and Google were given a pass.

“We’re happy to have a conversation with our peers, because we don’t think this is an issue focused on just us alone. So we were attempting to get our peers up there as well and be joined by them, rather than be singled out,” Dorsey said. “We don’t think that’s fair.”

He thinks utility-style regulation of internet companies is a bad idea.

One of the strangest twists in the Republican pressure campaign on big internet companies is that the traditionally business-friendly, anti-regulation party is floating the idea of government checks on the tech industry. Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, who has emerged as a vocal tech critic, has reportedly backed treating Twitter, Google and Facebook like public utilities, subject to government oversight. He recently called for the companies to be required to put their user data in some sort of public trust.

That isn’t a smart move, Dorsey argued.

“I think it comes out of the perception that Twitter is used as a public square,” he said, adding that it’s an unnecessary step “as long as we’re transparent around what’s guiding our decisions and enforcement, that we show willingness to evolve the rules as circumstances evolve.”