IF ONLY Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, had attended the rallies in Riga or Tbilisi over the weekend to hear President Bush tell the budding democrats of Latvia and Georgia how important it is for them to protect minority rights. Perhaps Frist would have emulated former Soviet bloc countries and moved to dismantle his threatened ''nuclear option."
But what's important for Eastern Europe is apparently not so important at home, where Bush and Frist are attempting to steamroll age-old minority rights in Congress in order to pepper the nation's courts with extremists.
If Frist succeeds in barring the Democrats' use of the filibuster to hold up judicial nominations, the result will be disastrous not only for the courts, including the Supreme Court, but also for the fundamental democratic principle that Bush embraced so warmly overseas.
Bush claims, as he made clear in a statement released in Washington on Monday, to be seeking Senate confirmation of ''extraordinarily qualified" judicial nominees who have ''bipartisan support" and who ''deserve a simple up-or-down vote by the entire Senate." They have not been ''treated fairly," Bush said, because Democrats have employed ''the partisan practices of the past" at an ''unprecedented level."
Bush is so palpably wrong on each point as to call his credibility into question.
The seven appeals court nominees in dispute are all far-right conservatives, and some have little experience. One spent most of his life as an industry lobbyist. There is almost no Democratic support for any of them. They do not ''deserve" an up-or-down vote any more than the scores of Bill Clinton nominees who never got one. As for fairness, the Senate has confirmed 208 of 218 Bush nominations to the bench -- the highest proportion for any recent administration. The Democrats' efforts to block out-of-the-mainstream judges are not unprecedented; it is the threatened demolition of minority rights in the Senate that would be a historic turning point.
By design, the Senate is the body with more continuity, a longer perspective, and a greater respect for minority opinions than either the House or the presidency. For decades, the chamber's unlimited debate rule meant that a single senator or two could block a bill. Now filibusters can be stopped only by a vote of 60 or more senators. Republicans may argue that if the Democrats wanted to prevail in the Senate, they should have secured the election of 51 members. But Democrats, with the 60-vote cloture rule in effect, can counter that Republicans should have elected 60 members if they wanted unfettered control. Since neither happened, the existing rules should be honored.
In fact, the Bush and Frist nuclear option is an attempt to change the rules in the middle of the game for totally partisan short-term advantage. It would damage the courts, and it would damage the Senate even more.