[OESY]

Example:

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, nominated by President Clinton for the Supreme Court in 1993 and confirmed by the Senate 96-3, once proposed the abolition of Mother's and Father's Day in favor of a unisex Parent's Day; she also once called for co-ed prisons and speculated that prostitution and polygamy might be rights guaranteed under the Constitution. Yet none of that put her "out of the mainstream" in the eyes of an overwhelming majority of Republican senators.

[wolfpat]

I thought the idea of having an independent judiciary was that they'd be out of the mainstream so they could make judgments based on what is right and wrong.

[Ron in Acreage]

mainstream is anything that the democrats agree with.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

The Democrats who were filibustering President Bush's judicial nominees were seeking, in effect, to define extremism leftward. Coming from a minority party the MSM Party, this was pure hubris routine.

Just another day at the office.

[Congressman Billybob]

Any "agreement" in any field and between any parties, is doomed to fall apart when it has the fatal defect in this "Compromise." As this article points out, at the heart of this "Compromise" is a concept that has no clear definition.

The Democrats' public statement repeat the mantra that Republican nominees are "out of the mainstream." The Compromise leaves the future use of the filibuster for "extraordinary circumstances." Both phrases have variable definitions, as if they were written in sand, in a high wind, at high tide.

And the 14 Senators who signed onto the Compromise apparently wanted it that way. The dirty little truth is that the 14 Senators used a deliberately fuzzy definition, because those men and women COULD NOT AGREE TO A SINGLE SET OF TERMS.

Of course the Compromise will fail. It already HAD failed before the ink was dry, and before the last self-congratulatory speech had been given.

Congressman Billybob

Latest column: "The Gunfight at Not-OK Corral"

[Tanniker Smith]

I consider the "main stream" of America to be the Mississippi River, and folks like Kennedy, Kerry and the whole northease couldn't see it with high-powered binoculars. Not even if they were in Nashville at the time.

TS

[RightWingAtheist]

Years ago, the Detroit Free Press (imagine the Minneapolis Star and Sickle at a third-grade writing level) had a piece on the SOTU judges, which classified them as being either "conservatives", "centrists" or "moderates". No "liberal" or even "progressive" in their system. Guess where they placed Red Ruth.

[Steve_Seattle]

This piece does a good job of putting the Dems' labeling into context and showing the falsity of their "extremism" charges. The whole judicial nomination thing - and the Dems' willful, concerted lying - is what drove me out of the party 25 years ago. A party that engages in systematic lying in order to pretend that a radical judicial agenda is in fact mainstream deserves nothing but contempt.