How then, can we do this?

Since Bush has said he won't nominate anyone until he gets back, Reid and Leahy should find someone they can put forward right now as their version of an acceptable candidate. Reid already put a few names out there of some Republican senators. Unfortunately it was before the O'Connor announcement so it got buried. The ideal candidate would someone who is conservative enough to tick off some liberal groups enough that they denounce him or her, but somehow unacceptable to the wingnuts. Hopefully, this scores Reid some Sistah Souljah points with the Tim Russert crowd.

Bush comes back from the G8 and nominates Scalia Jr. instead of Reid's suggestion. Reid responds with something like "I had hoped President Bush could have reached a bipartisan compromise". He should bring up the "Hatch suggesting Ginsburg" story. In fact, that story should be on the lips of every Democrat in front of a camera for the next few weeks. Alternatively, he could praise Reagan for nominating someone like O'Connor.

The key here is to be the reasonable, bipartisan Democrats the media and the Republicans have been telling us to be for so long. I know this will garner criticism, but it's imperative that we give the impression of being reasonable, open and moderate. This is because our task is to paint the Republicans as extremists. We have to show the public and the media that we're willing to put forth a good faith effort to find common ground. Of course, all of our reasonable suggestions will be slapped away out of hand, and Bush will forge ahead with Scalia Jr, freeing us to spend the summer talking about how we tried to be reasonable but the Bush just can't say no the radical special interests. To make this case well, we'll have to be saying no to our special interest groups.

When the hearings start, we can dig into Scalia Jr.'s background. Hopefully, he or she will be a Janice Rogers Brown type that has a lot of quotes out there. In any event, we should use every opportunity to show how radical and out of the mainstream the nominee is.  

Then, the nominee comes to the floor. Filibustering will probably only trigger the nuclear option, but we don't want to do that. Remember, Democrats are reasonable. Republicans are nutjobs. Still, before the filibuster question even comes up, Byrd, Conrad, Nelson, and a few other red staters who are up for re-election and/or members of the Gang of 14  should defect and say they won't filibuster because the nominee does not meet the extraordinary circumstances standard in the agreement. Scalia Jr. gets his or her up-or-down vote, that narrowly passes.

In the mean time, Reid and Leahy have been going to the public at every opportunity to show that they were hoping for a consensus candidate that the country could unite around, but unfortunately Bush just couldn't stand up to the special interests on his side, and let Ken Lay and James Dobson pick the nominee for him.

I know this strategy goes against everything we in the blogosphere have said in the last year about standing up and fighting, but while fighting might block SS privatization and John Bolton, it won't keep Scalia Jr. off the court. There are just too many out there. Instead we should use Scalia Jr. the way the GOP has used Ted Kennedy or Hillary Clinton. Whenever a Democrat runs in a red state, the refrain is that a vote for Jon Tester or a vote for Ben Nelson is a vote to have Hillary Clinton or Ted Kennedy in the leadership. We can turn this on its head, by arguing in 2006 that a vote for Jim Talent or Conrad Burns or Mike DeWine or Olympia Snowe is a vote for Scalia Jr. Filibustering or blocking the nominee just lets the moderates off the hook so they don't have that vote on their records.

The Republican coalition is fragile. It's essentially moderate suburbanites who like low taxes and sexist, racist, homophobes. If we can make a sexist, racist, homophobe the face of the Republican party we can do serious damage to their coalition, so that John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, or Wes Clark can have a Democratic Congress and undo the damage these nutjobs have wrought.