Sorry to be late to this–was focused on the other chamber as soon as the Alito hearings ended. I’m not entirely sure what the point of this “narrow point” Specter thread is. Specter did a fine job presiding over the hearings. That’s what he’s supposed to do. As far as the past goes–a year ago this November–he issued a warning to the president and announced a litmus test–against too-conservative nomineees–the morning after the presidential election. It was our view (my words here, not “ours”) that Senate Republicans should get a backbone–publicly acknowledge that conservative values won the election and they should actually take the lead in D.C.–and say club rules be damned. They chose not to. I think that was a mistake, albeit, clearly, not the end of the world. He’s chairman. As chairman, he did his job with the two excellent candidates the White House put up who made it to the committee. Good for him. That doesn’t mean it was wrong to have opposed him for chairman. It wasn’t.

By the way, I think it’s always worthwhile to thank people when they’ve done a service–the mailman when he brings the mail, the bartender when he mixes your drink, the committee chairman when he ends an arduous week of hearings. And I don’t think Jonah was saying that in hindsight it was wrong to oppose Specter for chairman. But because I know “narrow points” on the Internet can reverberate to become bigger and more dramatic than they might have been intended, I did want to say that (the previous graph).

Here, by the way, is what we wrote at the time about the Specter-chairmanship issue.