A good liittlew case was made–albeit inadvertently–in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette endorsement of Specter in October: “The best argument for his staying on is his

seniority, which puts him in line to be the chairman

of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In that capacity,

he would be in a position to block some of the

ideologically extreme federal judges likely to be

nominated by President Bush in a second term, some of

them for the Supreme Court. Before the Post-Gazette

editorial board, he promised that no extremists would

be approved for the bench.”