'Watch Those Guys'

Here's what Santorum said: "The audacity of some members to stand up and say, 'How dare you break this rule,' that's the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 saying, 'I'm in Paris. How dare you invade me. How dare you bomb my city. It's mine.' This is no more the rule of the Senate than it was the rule of the Senate before not to filibuster."

Huh?

Santorum later insisted that his words were "meant to dramatize the principle of an argument, not to characterize my Democratic colleagues." Gee, thanks for that.

Oh, yes, and although he is not a senator, Pat Robertson certainly speaks for the constituency to which Bill Frist was pandering. When ABC News' George Stephanopoulos asked him, "How can you say that these judges are a more serious threat than Islamic terrorists who slammed into the World Trade Center?" Robertson replied: "I think the gradual erosion of the consensus that's held our country together is probably more serious than a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings."

The authors of the Monday night compromise rejected such extremism.

The deal is not perfect. There are grounds to worry that the federal judiciary will be dominated at the end of the Bush years by a certain style of conservative -- Janice Rogers Brown is representative -- ready to roll back the New Deal jurisprudence of the last 70 years. Many who buy this legal approach preach that federal rules on wages and hours, environmental and business regulation, should be overturned by courts that would use 19th-century standards to void Washington's capacity to create rational standards for a complex 21st-century economy. Stopping such a judicial takeover would justify filibusters.

But for now, at least, the principle of Senate scrutiny of judges has been preserved. We will continue to have these guys to watch those guys.

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