During the recent, raucous debate in the U.S. Senate over what's procedurally kosher in considering a president's judicial selections, opponents of several Bush nominees persistently dismissed the prospective judges in question as "extremists." My colleague at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Ed Whelan, thereupon proposed a thought-experiment:

Imagine that a Democratic president nominated for the federal bench a judge who had suggested that there was a constitutional right to prostitution and a constitutional right to polygamy; who had blasted the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts for promoting gender stereotypes; who had proposed abolishing Mothers' Day and Fathers' Day, substituting an androgynous "Parents' Day;" who had advocated abolishing same-sex prisons, on the grounds that male prisoners returning to a work environment in which men and women are equal could learn to deal respectfully with women in co-ed jails; and who, while arguing that "manifest" racial imbalance in a company's work force was de facto evidence of deliberate racial discrimination, had never, while working in the private sector, employed a single African-American (in a majority-black city!) in over 50 hires.

It seems almost too absurd. Would any Democratic president nominate to the federal bench a jurist with views like this --- views that are, by most understandings of the term, "extreme"? Or, if a Democratic president would attempt such a nomination, surely some Senate Democrats would object --- not to mention Senate Republicans, who would certainly use the filibuster and every other legitimate legislative tactic to stop such a nomination. Wouldn't they?

Well, not quite.

For the not-so-fictional nominee in question here is none other than Ruth Bader Ginsburg, current Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, who was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on a 96-3 vote, having taken every one of the positions noted in Ed Whelan's thought-experiment.