GEORGE WILL -- HYPOCRITE, TOO: Well, beneath all the fustigating, at least George Will's editorial today is clear about one thing:

". . .if the Republican Senate leadership cannot bring [Estrada's] nomination to a vote, Republican 'control' of the Senate will be risible.'

Will accuses Democrats of seeking to "nullify[] the president's power to shape the judiciary." Here's a description of Will's editorial: an expansionist view of executive power combines with a kind of constitutional argument, coincidentally, at the precise moment in history in which a Republican president is trying to nominate judges who are objected to by Democrats. Oh, and, coincidentally, Republicans have been arguing all along that they have the correct constitutional understanding, and that it's likely that 70 years of constitutional law is actually unconstitutional.

But two things are really strange about today's editorial. One is that in an October 12, 1997 editorial published in the Times-Picayune urging the Republicans to reject Bill Lan Lee, then a Clinton nominee for assistant attorney general for civil rights, Will argued as follows:

A sufficient reason for the Senate Judiciary Committee to reject President Clinton's nomination of Bill Lann Lee to be assistant attorney general for civil rights is that Lee, in his career of litigating on behalf of peculiar notions of "civil rights," has exemplified the aggressive cynicism characteristic of today's liberal idealists.

A deeply satisfying and entirely valid second reason for rejecting the nomination is payback. In 1989 the committee, then controlled by Democrats, rejected President Bush's nomination of William Lucas to the position for which Lee has been nominated.

Note, then, that Will urges payback when it suits him. Interesting.

A second is that in an editorial on April 18, 1994, also in the Times-Picayune, Will sneeringly wrote the following lines about Clinton's admittedly weird floating of George Mitchell for a Supreme Court seat:

Again the president is allowing the selection process to become so protracted that all the ideological, racial, ethnic and sexual lobbies can work up a robust sense of entitlement to the court seat. Given the importance of California - and Florida and Texas - to the president's re-election plans, he may be looking for someone with a Hispanic surname.

That would please people who subscribe to the theory of categorical representation - that people can only be properly represented by people of the same racial, sexual or ethnic category. That theory is pernicious when applied to representative institutions, and is doubly so when applied to judicial institutions. But perhaps the Supreme Court no longer is one.

Since it is so clear that Bush has been using race as a wedge issue here -- and this is not lost on Orrin Hatch, as I noted yesterday, here -- it is surprising that Will does not now comment on it. I suppose Will is still a subscriber to a Clinton-centered view of political evil: when Clinton does something, it's bad, but when Republicans use the same tactics, it's high-minded defense of constitutional principles.

Michael Kinsley is proven to be right again: Judicial nomination battles bring out the hypocrite in all of us. Even the hypocrite in George Will. I understand that as a prolific writer and publicist, Will has made a very good living arguing some very smart positions. I often agree with him, albeit more typically on baseball than on politics. But if Will wants to retain whatever credibility he has left in my eyes, he will need to provide a convincing explanation of today's editorial in light of his past endorsement of "payback" and his past criticism of nominations based on race or ethnicity.

Thanks to How Appealing for the link to Will's editorial.