News from Around the World

This country has only one president at a time. That president, right now President Bush, is tasked with naming judges. The Senate has the role of providing advice and consent on the president’s choices, which is a significant constitutional task. But if the presidential election means anything in this arena, it must mean that the president’s choice has a heavy presumption of confirmation. That is the way the system works. Why else would Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg have received only a handful of no-votes among them? During the Clinton administration, we deplored the way that the Senate treated the president’s judicial nominees during six years of Republican control over the Senate. Yet during those six years, the Senate confirmed 245 of President Bill Clinton’s judges. If Republicans had been applying Mr. Reid’s standard, they would have been within their rights to reject them all.