Last week, amidst stories from the front of Bush’s Iraqi quagmire and the jobless economic “recovery,” it was easy to miss one of the few Democratic victories. In the Senate, Democrats were successful in blocking Charles Pickering’s nomination to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

While Democrats controlled the Senate, the Senate Judiciary Committee blocked Pickering’s nomination due to his history of opposition to civil rights advancements.

Bush elevated his contempt for bipartisanship by resubmitting Pickering as a nominee hours after Republicans reclaimed the Senate earlier this year. This marked the first time in American history a President had resubmitted a nominee for the same position after he had been dismissed by a prior Judiciary Committee. Given the tenacity with which this Republican administration attacked the progressive advancements of the past, no one should be surprised at this unprecedented act.

Charles Pickering typifies the sort of Southern right-wing idealogues who have been part of a Republican strategy to dominate the judicial branch. During the ultra-conservative Reagan administration, Republican strategists began this broad strategy to control the future of American jurisprudence. They want to control how the Constitution is interpreted in order to control what type of legislation is considered “constitutional.”

Knowing they could never legislate away programs like affirmative action, abortion rights and other civil liberties, Republicans have decided to attack these progressive policies from the source of Constitutional interpretation, the federal judiciary. While Republicans constantly attack the “judicial activism” of liberals, they are engaging in their own “judicial activism” designed to return America to an imagined past of libertarian idealism.

Americans can no longer pretend judicial selection is an objective process free of politics. In truth, politics and the federal judiciary have always gone hand-in-hand. Franklin Roosevelt, the eminent Democrat, deliberately tried to manipulate the size of the Supreme Court in an attempt to receive judicial legitimacy for his initial New Deal programs. Liberal courts, such as the Warren Court, used the power of the bench to expand freedom in America to everyone regardless of sex and race, despite the best efforts of the Trent Lott’s of this country to block progress.

I am sure my Republican friends could find numerous other examples of Democrats making politicized judicial nominations. Right now the politics of the federal judiciary that will mold America in the long-term are being fought over. Republicans are attempting an end-run around public opinion, freedom and liberal values that will have implications for decades.

Liberals and moderates alike must stand up and point out Bush and his ultra-conservative court-packing is truly anti-American.