With A Whimper.(ISSUES & INSIGHTS)(EDITORIALS)(Editorial)

Supreme Court: After all the talk about a "swing vote" being lost to the Right with the confirmation of Justice Samuel Alito, the left in the end went quietly. Is Borking now a thing of the past?

It does seem that bare-knuckle attacks on conservative nominees to the high court are going at least temporarily out of style. Maybe smart liberals can see that the assaults don't work against a decent, mild-mannered, well-qualified judge with no hint of scandal in his past.

Or maybe the public has changed. The activists who sank Robert Bork's nomination in 1987 were gunning for Alito, and they were doing what they could to stir up some outrage. Their Senate champion, Ted Kennedy, was in full cry. The New York Times was cheering them on. They pushed the usual buttons such as Roe v. Wade (which Alito at one point clearly opposed) and the nominee's supposed insensitivity to women and minorities.

But nothing much happened. Beyond the Democratic Party base, people seemed not to care all that much that Alito was likely to move the Supreme Court to the right. And on one issue -- that of the alleged threat of presidential power -- his enemies may simply have shot themselves in the foot.

Imagining a wave of public anger over reports of warrantless wiretapping in the war on terror, they tried to paint Alito as a patsy for the executive branch. At a time when most people probably worry that the ...