That’s the title of my new Confirmation Tales post, which begins:

In any history of the judicial-confirmation wars, the battle over George W. Bush’s nomination of appellate lawyer Miguel Estrada to a D.C. Circuit seat in 2001 deserves its own chapter. Senate Democrats opposed the superbly qualified nominee especially fiercely because he was Hispanic: they wanted to prevent him from becoming the first Hispanic on the Supreme Court, and they feared that service on the D.C. Circuit would put him on a glide path to that destination.
After Democrats lost control of the Senate in 2003, they dramatically escalated the battle against Estrada by resorting to a weapon that had never before been used against an appellate nominee: the filibuster. In various ways that they didn’t foresee, their precipitous intensification of the confirmation wars helped pave the way to the Supreme Court that we have today.

You’ll find the rest of the post of interest, I think. Please sign up for Confirmation Tales.