the first statement will be made by mort rosenberg, followed by doug, david rifgen and walter dellinger. after the formal presentation, i'll give the panel a chance to question one another and i'm sure we will see a spirited debate from that point. then we go on to questions of the audience. so keep track of things you don't think have actually been covered and we'll try to address those. many thanks for being here. i hope you find this panel, as i think you will, informative. let me start then, with an introduction for mort. all i have to do is find tepaper and i'll sit down. >> what i want to say about mort, he is an expert and has been a good many years in the appointments issue. he was a member of the congressional research service and he was there during one of the periods when the crs had its most important business dealing with appointments. that is during the watergate period for richard nixon. and his opinions, there were nine of them during that period, were extremely important in establishing some of the basic ideas for how we look today at the appointments process. he's also