Jesse Holland (AP):
"The Senate voted 78-22 to confirm Roberts - a 50-year-old U.S. Appeals judge from the Washington suburb of Chevy Chase, Md. - as the successor to the late William H. Rehnquist, who died earlier this month.
All of the Senate's majority Republicans, and about half of the Democrats, voted for Roberts."
Well, my prediction that Roberts would only get 15 Democratic votes max turned out to be overly pessimistic. But it seems that the Democrats decided to keep their powder dry in preparation of the next SCOTUS nominee, whom they would like to be a clone of the retiring Sandra Day O'Connor. As I noted in this post, Bush would be wise to follow the Clinton Precedent, where Clinton replaced the conservative Byron White with the ultraliberal Ruth Bader Ginsberg rather than seek "balance" by appointing another conservative.
The Democrats have been threatening a filibuster for the last four years. It's time for the Republicans to make them actually do something other than threaten.
UPDATE: The final tally of the Democratic vote on Roberts is here.
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