So today on C-Span there was a panel discussion on the '04 elections and the future of the judiciary between Nan Aron of the Alliance for Justice, playing on Team Good, and Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform (Seemingly a strange choice for a discussion on law), representing Team Evil.

Anyhow, the debate eventually came to the subject of lower court nominations, which I've covered down below before.

To recap: the right has made it a priority to get its ideologues appointed up and down the line to district courts, circuit courts, and the Supreme Court, from Reagan era on. Democrats have been far more lackadaisical while controlling the White House, with both Carter and Clinton making judicial appointments a low priority, often nominating centrist, or even conservative judges.

This fact notwithstanding, Senate Republicans made sure to obstruct Clinton's nominees at every opportunity throughout the 90s. Often times Clinton's moderate nominees were bottled up by the Senate without ever receiving a floor vote, thus keeping vacancies open for Bush, who has tried to fill them with right-wing extremists.

While confirming an overwhelming majority of Bush's nominees (and at a far higher rate than Clinton's ever were), the Democrats have stopped action on a few of the most egregious nominees, like those who supported Jim Crow, and when they lost control of the Senate in 2002, they resorted to the filibuster.

That's the background.

The Republicans scream bloody murder at the use of the filibuster for judicial nominees, regardless of the fact they found it quite useful in blocking Abe Fortas and others back in the day. They've tried to reform the filibuster rules for judicial nominees, effectively eliminating it on the subject matter of their choice.

In the panel discussion, the liberal got herself into the position of defending the filibuster as a key check on unrestrained majority rule, and Grover Norquist called her out on it, saying liberals were no fans of the filibuster rule back when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was being debated, and filibustered by the likes of Strom Thurmond.

He's right. Let's abolish the filibuster on judicial nominees, and let's abolish the filibuster period. If the "advise and consent" responsibility of the Senate is unconstitutionally abridged by the filibuster in judicial confirmations, then the responsibility of the Senate to pass bills is abridged by the use of the filibuster against everything else.

Why are we so reluctant to expose the Republican whining for what it is? Call the bluff, Senate Dems. Move to end the anti-democratic filibuster, permanently. It'll bolster democracy, and it will aid liberal aims in the long run with a Senate that's deeply skewed towards conservative, small-state constituencies. As it is, the filibuster can be sustained with something like 20% of the country's population's Senators behind it.

Let's get rid of it.