There's a "whiff" all right,

but it's not right-wing "extremism." Chuck Schumer needs an editor for lines like There is a whiff of extremism in the air the likes of which we haven't seen in decades. There exists a small group of people who have no tolerance for those whose views are different from theirs and they seek to intimidate everyone else.

I haven't seen any whiffs either lately, but I sure smell the one Schumer's putting out. I've been around farms before. That "small group of people" he's talking about won the last several elections, and are now a majority in the Senate, a fact he seems to think should be unconstitutional. To me and about 70% of other voters, gay marriage imposed by courts is extremism, as is using threats to shut down the Senate if you don't get your way. I'm fully aware that Republicans blocked a lot of Clinton's judges, but that was in an effort to protect against more powergrabbing by federal courts.

If I were neutral on this, I would say that the Constitution gives every nominee a right to a floor vote, but that leads to some untenable situations, like Abe Fortas becoming Chief Justice. A cloture vote on that failed because it got out that Fortas was LBJ's gofer, not an independent jurist, and both Democrats and Republicans voted against the motion. When the delay held and the facts about Fortas' conduct as a justice came out, LBJ withdrew his nomination.

It's not much of a secret that the reason Dems don't want Bush's nominees to come to a floor vote is because they know they'd be approved (which means they're not all that radical), and because they fear they might be nominated to the Supreme Court in the future and might turn back decisions like Roe v. Wade. That's what makes them "extremists" in the minds of people like Schumer. That's part of a strategy which calls judges who would be more hesitant than to intervene in legislative matters as "activists." They want us to believe that the radical decisions of the past 40 years are normal, and that filibusters are part of our "sacred constitutional tradition," their use to block civil rights legislation notwithstanding. This train of "logic" is pretty thin to justify preventing well-qualified nominees from even getting a vote.

So I don't care that Republicans blocked Clinton's nominees. They were probably right to do so. But you'll note that Clinton got to name two Supreme Court Justices. Nobody filibustered them. One can guess what the Democrats' response would have been if they had. The tradition of the Senate is that you don't filibuster presidential nominees. It's time that Republicans got a backbone and stood up for real Senate tradition and the obvious intent of the Constitution..

The hypocrisy of senators like Schumer, Kennedy, Kerry and Boxer on this issue is enough to persuade me that they deserve to be beaten on that ground alone. Their "arguments" are an insult to the Senate and the voters.