Estrada Gambit and a Gal Named Alice

Here’s a chart of how senators are planning to vote on Roberts. A friend of mine said he got an e-mail from a group yesterday that still thinks we need to “fight for Roberts and America!” but 68 votes wraps this thing up.

Jonah Goldberg ponders what the Dems’ behavior during the Roberts nomination means for the next nomination:

The Democrats would have been in much better shape politically if they all followed Leahy and Feingold’s course and accepted Roberts, with all the usual grumblings. Whether they voted for or against Roberts, however, all of the pressures inside the Democratic Party are set to explode, and it’s in Bush’s best interests to light the match.

Buy some popcorn; it’s going to be one heck of a show.

Howie says a filibuster is in order for Bush’s next nominee. Of Janice Rogers Brown and Priscilla Owens he said:

“Those people are clearly not qualified to sit on the Supreme Court, and we’re going to do everything we can to make sure they don’t,” he said. “If we lose, better to go down fighting and standing for what we believe in, because we will not win an election if the public doesn’t think we’ll stand up for what we believe in.”

Betsy Newmark thinks all the talk about Gonzales and Owen is misdirection. She’s interested in Alice Batchelder of the Sixth Circuit, who Townhall noted was interviewed by the White House (my blog is broke right now, so I can’t make the link work, but I swear we did).

Last week, she gave a speech at the Ashbrook Center that was reaired on C-Span last night. You can listen to it here. I thought she displayed a grace and charm in that speech as well as a puckish sense of humor that would make her a very appealing witness before the Judiciary Committee. I think she would be as disarming as John Roberts has been. She sounds hard to demonize in the way that Edith Jones or Janice Rogers Brown would be. With no inside knowledge whatsoever, I became very high on the possibility of her nomination.

Here’s some background on her from someone who knows her personally. She’s been a Volokh Conspiracy top pick for a while.

Confirm Them says, at 61, Batchelder’s not too old.

The AP thinks we should add yet another name to the nominee list.

And, Hugh Hewitt doesn’t want to take a chance on Estrada but thinks he would put Dems in an tricky situation:

…the Democrats face a horrible prospect of a nationally televised mugging of an immigrant success story who has a background very similar to John Roberts’. When you have to begin every statement with a denial of anti-Latino bias, you are losing not just the nomination battle, but an electoral demographics war.