David Bernstein is happy Charles Pickering’s nomination went down in flames today; Matthew Stinson isn’t. I said my piece on the topic in June, but I’ll repeat it here:

[M]y message to Democrats remains the same: if you believe he’s unfit to serve on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals [on the grounds that he treats minorities unfairly], by definition he’s also unfit to serve as a district court judge. Be consistent, call for his impeachment and removal from office, and find some additional evidence, and then I might take your objections seriously. Until then, the whole situation reeks of inside-the-beltway politics and “easy,” gratuitous Mississippi bashing.

Or, as Matthew puts it:

There’s no principle in opposing Pickering’s nomination, simply partisanship. Democrats invent the Pickering-as-racist bogeyman charge because it’s a much better story than them saying that Pickering is “unfit” to be a judge simply because he’s a Republican.

Now—unlike Matthew—I don’t particularly care if Pickering becomes a judge or not. But if Democrats continue to play games with the filibuster, they’re either going to find the shoe on the other foot (do you honestly see Orrin Hatch rolling over for Howie Dean when he tries to put Stephen Reinhardt on the Supreme Court?) or themselves out their last real weapon against Republican hegemony—because I guarantee you that if the Republicans can scrape together sixty Senate seats, the filibuster as we know it will be gone from the Senate rules faster than you can say “Jim Jeffords’ office is a converted broomcloset.”

Scipio, at The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, blames Trent Lott for the whole debacle. Yeah, that’s about right…