On Monday night, CBS reported that conservative former federal judge Kenneth Starr believes Senate Republicans are being imprudent in pushing to kill even the possibility of filibusters against judicial nominees.
Fine. But CBS didn't stop there. It spliced a quote from Mr. Starr to make it sound like he was accusing Republicans of "a radical departure from our history and from our traditions, and it amounts to an assault on the judicial branch of government."
One little problem: It was the Democrats, not the Republicans, who were the target of Kenneth Starr's comment. Here's Mr. Starr's explanation, via an e-mail publicized by National Review Online and the Media Research Center:
"The 'radical departure' snippet was specifically addressed -- although this is not evidenced whatever from the clip -- to the practice of invoking judicial philosophy as a grounds for voting against a qualified nominee of in tegrity and experience. I said in sharp language that that practice was wrong."
It is the Democrats who, quite consciously, began for the first time to invoke judicial philosophy as the main reason to vote against qualified nominees. Here's a New York Times report from May 1, 2001, about a meeting Democratic senators held then with three liberal legal activists: "'They said it was important for the Senate to change the ground rules and there was no obligation to confirm someone just because they are scholarly or erudite,' a person who attended said."
