Ramesh, on the matter of despair, you are missing my point. Far from cosmically pessimistic, I think I am spoiling for this fight more than you are. I just don’t want to underestimate what we are up against, which I fear you are doing. I also think you are miscalculating what makes good politics for the Democrats because you are incorrectly assuming that Republicans and Democrats have the same goals.

You concede that we don’t have unambiguous data to draw on regarding the politics of filibusters and say that you must therefore try “to make sense of what evidence we have.” I agree with that – but to do it, you have to try to make sense of all the evidence we have. You, instead, have mined what works in your favor: namely, that some Republicans in some red states have raised the filibusters to some unquantifiable but positive effect, and (more speculatively) that confirmations may be tied up with other social issues on which the GOP has gotten the electoral upper hand. I don’t disagree that this is relevant, nor do I question your excellent reporting on it.

But you are still skipping past the elephant (or, I suppose, the donkey) in the middle of the room: the Democrats promise to continue filibustering. That is a more salient fact than the ones from which you’re inferring that filibusters are hurting the Democrats. Unless you think the opposition is irrational, it should be a nearly dispositive fact. As it happens, they are far from irrational: they are doing what makes perfect sense for them to do.

You would be unassailably right here if everyone’s endgame were gaining a hammer-lock on the congress. But Democrats – being years away from any hope of that – are not primarily animated by that concern. They care most about what is possible for them in the here and now: control of the courts. This is smart. The more tyrannical the courts are, the less democracy there is, and the more control of the courts rather than control of congress is the determinant of real power. If you and the GOP leadership believe locking down a permanent legislative majority in the next few cycles is where the politics is at, I suggest – and I say this with the greatest respect – that you have your eyes on the wrong ball.

While the GOP homes in on that project, the Democrats are focused on changing norms. Thus it is that, despite increasing GOP margins in the last decade-plus, we have devolved steadily from a time when character/competence was the principal issue in judicial confirmations, to general acceptance of the notion that ideology is a proper basis for voting against a nominee, to the new norm that ideology is in fact a proper basis for blocking a nominee from even getting a vote.

Given that Democrats are much less inclined to democracy, sovereignty and tradition than we are, it makes eminent sense for them to do this. They have no current chance of becoming a majority; but they have a very good chance, if they stay the course, of either forcing President Bush to appoint non-conservatives who might impose Democratic preferences, or creating a backlog of vacancies that might eventually be filled by a Democratic president after 2008. That’s what’s important to their backers, that’s why the filibusters are good politics for them, and that’s why they are not going to stop, especially for a Supreme Court nomination.

For us, the endgame here is to get originalists on the bench – right now, when the openings are there (and emerging), when President Bush is at the height of his power, and when we are at a tipping point in the ideological composition of the federal courts. That will require defeating the filibusters, which I don’t think can be done in the short term (i.e., when we need it to be done) without the nuclear option.

My way, we take it head-on, endure the inevitable heat, end up with real democracy and a bunch of good judges, but probably lose parts of the President’s agenda – regrettable, but not as significant as winning on the judges. Your way, maybe the President can get some Democratic cooperation on the rest of the agenda, but I’m afraid we won’t get the good judges – at least not now. We’ll get the political issue that the Democrats are obstructionists, which might (or might not) help pick up a few seats in congress in 2006 and 2008, but almost certainly won’t garner the working majority of 60 that, thanks to the new norm (which will grow more accepted if not challenged), is now necessary to get nominees confirmed. Worse, in the meantime, we will have either unfilled judicial slots (which necessarily means many more big cases decided by unbalanced federal appellate courts tilted to the activist Left) or those slots filled by confirmable, “moderate” judges (rather than Scalias) who, we empirically know, trend Left and anti-democratic over time and will sit on the bench for the next quarter-century or more.

Finally, I give ground to you on Ashcroft. That AG was a high-ranking national security position does not change the fact that, as you correctly maintain, Ashcroft’s nomination did not play out in those terms. Gonzales is the better case for me on this point – because his confirmation was both after 9/11 and after the Democrats changed the norms on filibusters.

As for the rest of what we’ve discussed, I hope you’re right and I’m wrong.