In the spirit of checking even the campaign I favor when it goes too far, I would like to upbraid John McCain’s surrogates for continuing a bit of unjustified credit-claiming. Yesterday, repeating some self-congratulation that McCain made himself in his May 6 speech on the judiciary, Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota referred on Fox News Sunday to the “gang of 14 that Senator Obama was against that gave us Justice Roberts and Alito” (transcript via RCP).

I wish they’d stop saying this. Not because Barack Obama can really exploit this exaggeration for any advantage, but because it’s just not true. I was against the “Gang of 14″ deal, others were for it. It produced some confirmations of appellate judges and doomed others. But a resolute determination to ignore the facts of our recent history is required to assert that the deal had one iota of impact on the confirmation chances of Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Samuel Alito. Seats on the circuit benches are easy targets for filibusters because too few people pay close attention or have enough at stake to produce the outrage that would make senators balk at taking such a step. But there was never, never, never any chance that either Roberts or Alito was going to be filibustered by the Democrats. Talk of doing so was the purest fili-bluster. And if there had been some plausible excuse for their going ahead with a filibuster, no deal by the Gang of 14 would have slowed them down for a moment.

So to Senator McCain and his surrogates: Defend the deal on its own terms or stay quiet about it, please. But don’t try to make it responsible for Supreme Court confirmations on which it had no impact whatsoever. It’s simply not so.