With John McCain's return to the front of the Republican pack, the conservative Weekly Standard is reexamining the Arizona's vices and virtues. But while Dean Barnett bemoans McCain's "uncanny ability to drive virtually all conservatives nuts," Adam White and Kevin White praise McCain's record on the confirmation of right-wing judges. Not because McCain's position on the so-called "nuclear option" was right in principle. No, the Standard lauded McCain's success with the "Gang of 14" because it preserved the ability of a Republican minority to block future Democratic judicial nominations.

In looking back at the 2005 Senate battle over President Bush's judicial picks, the Whites argue that McCain and the bipartisan group of 14 Senators seeking a middle ground between the Democrats' filibuster threats and Majority Leader Bill Frist's nuclear option were right on three grounds.

First, they assert, Frist was too politically inept to have carried the day in amending Senate rules to end filibusters of judicial nominations. (Despite the fact that the Senate parliamentarian publicly objected to the so-called nuclear option, the authors insist "such a maneuver was almost certainly proper under Senate precedent.") Frist, they claim, didn't have the votes for the rule change and lacked the needed skill and savvy to draw "the inside straight" to win over McCain and other potential GOP defectors.

But while McCain wasn't right on the merits, the Standard piece argues he was right on the politics. Robert Bork, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Hugh Hewitt, Mark Levin, and Rick Santorum may have all been furious with McCain, but at the end of the day, President Bush got his judges confirmed:

Thus, in the end, the Gang of 14's compromise paved the way for the confirmation of some of the finest conservative judges in recent history: John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Janice Rogers Brown, William Pryor, and others.

Even more important, with the very real prospect of a Democratic president and Senate in the GOP's future, Frist's pain will be the Republican's gain when it comes time to block judicial appointees in 2009:

Finally, it must be noted that McCain's opposition to the nuclear option did not merely serve short-term conservative interests in the specific context of Bush's nominations; rather, it served long-term conservative interests in the federal bench generally. As McCain has warned, there will come a day--perhaps soon--when a Democratic president will nominate decidedly non-conservative justices and judges, and a Democratic Senate majority will want desperately to confirm them. When that moment arrives, conservatives will call on the Republican minority to utilize every tool in the Senate minority playbook to thwart those nominations--especially the filibuster. While the McCain's Gang of 14 cost conservatives the confirmation of William Haynes to the Fourth Circuit and Henry Saad to the Sixth Circuit, its preservation of the filibuster threat may ultimately prevent the ascent of Supreme Court judges that Laura Ingraham and Rick Santorum would dearly regret.

While seemingly a startling admission for the supposed supporters of the Republican "Up or Down Vote" talking point, the Weekly Standard merely confirmed what we all knew to be the case. That is, the Republican Party rediscovered its love of obstructionism in general and the filibuster in particular at precisely the moment Democrats recaptured the Senate in November 2006.

While President Bush promised to stay "relevant" with vetoes and recess appointments, the Congressional GOP waged a historically unprecedented campaign of obstructionism to deny the majority Democrats any legislative wins and thus brand theirs a "do nothing Congess.". As Robert Borosage detailed in July, while Democrats in the House kept their promise to pass a raft of legislation including Medicare drug negotiation, the minimum wage, student loan reform and more, Republicans in the Senate stymied overwhelmingly popular bills at every turn:

"Bills with majority support -- raising the minimum wage, ethics reform, a date to remove troops from Iraq, revoking oil subsidies and putting the money into renewable energy, fulfilling the 9/11 commission recommendations on homeland security--get blocked because they can't garner 60 votes to overcome a filibuster."

Former Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott (R-MS) was one of the essential architects of the filibuster fever in the Grand Obstruction Party. While decrying that "the Senate is spiraling into the ground to a degree that I have never seen before" and "all modicum of courtesy is going out the window," Lott was also brutally frank about his strategy to prevent any Democratic wins come hell or high water:

"The strategy of being obstructionist can work or fail. So far it's working for us."

An analysis by McClatchy showed that by July Republicans have already resorted to the filibuster 42 times and on track to block Senate action over 150 times this term, shattering the previous record by almost a factor of three. By December 18th, as the Campaign for America's Future detailed, the GOP easily set the record in just the first year of the 110th Congress:

"62 times conservatives have used the filibuster to block legislation (or force modification of bills) in the first session of the 110th Congress. In just the first year of this two-year Congress, their use of the filibuster in the Senate topped the previous record, reached during the entire 107th Congress."

Americans should expect this Republican obstructionism to continue at its record setting pace through 2008 and beyond if, as expected, the Democrats win both the presidency and Congress. While the Weekly Standard may not still be praising John McCain after November, you can be certain they will call the judicial filibuster their friend.