The Democrats are carrying on as though there were an unbroken tradition, stretching back to the Founders, of using filibusters to require a 60-vote supermajority to confirm judges

The Democrats are carrying on as though there were an unbroken tradition, stretching back to the Founders, of using filibusters to require a 60-vote supermajority to confirm judges. Actually, the routine use of the filibuster traces back only to the moment they decided to do everything in their power to block President Bush from putting conservatives on appeals courts.

The Democrats have been successful: Bush has gotten a historically low percentage of his appeals-court nominees confirmed. A simple majority of the Senate can change the rules to prevent this abuse. We suspect that the Democrats' campaign of filibusters would come to a natural end even without a formal change in the rules, because the public would expect a Supreme Court nominee to get an up-or-down vote. But Senate Republican leaders seem to think that the risk of letting the filibusters continue is unacceptable, and they have staked their credibility on passing a rules change. The Democrats will complain that ending the filibusters of judges will diminish the rights of the minority party. But those "rights" are a matter of give-and-take in the Senate, and it is their own contumacy that has endangered them. If they want to block Bush's judges, the Democrats will just have to do it the old-fashioned way: by electing more senators.