That’s the title of my new Confirmation Tales post, which discusses Senate Democrats’ momentous decision in 2003 to deploy the filibuster against George W. Bush’s nomination of Miguel Estrada to a D.C. Circuit seat. No single action did more to escalate the judicial-confirmation wars. An excerpt:

No one could be sure in advance how the politics of the Democrats’ unprecedented partisan filibuster would play out. But the fact is that a fight over a lower-court judicial nomination doesn’t get much public attention, especially when the media isn’t supportive of the nominee. Plus, far more significant news was dominating the airwaves in March 2003: the launch of the American war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Filibustering Democrats quickly determined that they weren’t paying a price with their constituents for their obstruction and that they were winning credit with liberal interest groups. So with every cloture vote, their opposition to cloture became more entrenched.
The seventh and last cloture vote on Estrada’s nomination took place on July 30. It too received only 55 votes.
In early September, Miguel Estrada decided that he had had enough.

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