STRANGE BUT TRUE: As this story about the partisan battle going on over the Estrada nomination makes clear, the Washington Post's REPORTERS are smarter than their EDITORIAL STAFF. For the reasons why I think so, in addition to the comments below, see my post here.

Just to add to the argument: what really seems to bother the good folks at WP is that Democrats are holding up a nomination for partisan reasons. For the life of me I can't really understand why this is surprising or even troubling. Telling the Democrats to cave doesn't make any sense. Why not castigate Bush for the kind of "politics" that he's been playing all along with respect to judicial nominations? Check out the RNC's partisan battle-axe e-mail recently and my comments on it here, for example.

Democrats should push this as far as they can and try to get Bush NOT to nominate stealth conservative candidates. If they lose, too bad. But telling them to give up is telling them to stop representing the interests of those constituents who express intense preferences. Call this: the Seventeenth Amendment meets interest group politics in the aftermath of the Bork confirmation hearings. The confirmation process might be ugly. So are a lot of things. Unilateral disarmament is no solution.