Those Crazy Senators! So the GOP is going to gab for 30 hours to highlight the unfair obstructionism of the Democrats using (gasp) The Filibuster (/gasp) to oppose judicial nominations. Easterbrook has a good take:

"This is not just for show," Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, one of the yak-a-thon proponents, pronounced. Of course it's just for show! There is zero possibility the event will change Democratic votes on the disputed nominees . . . [Majority Leader Bill] Frist says the yak-a-thon will raise public awareness regarding the cloture rule. People are going to march in the streets about cloture?

Raise public awareness? Isn't that we have liberal whiners . . . er, activists for? I've made no secret of the fact that I think the Democrats' strategy is petty, juvenile, ill conceived, and likely to backfire. The GOP, obviously, believes in fighting fire with fire -- hence the petty, juvenile, ill conceived gesture now going on in the Senate that will likely backfire.

In the coincidences department, Easterbrook is surely aware that his brother Frank has been mentioned as a possible "spoiler" recess appointment if the Dems succeed in blocking the current slate. The idea goes that Bush, if defeated by the Senate, would recess-appoint some leading conservative intellectuals for a year -- ostensibly to make the Dems realize how safe-as-milk mainstream the current nominees really are. Easterbrook, Posner, Kozinski, and Bork are regularly mentioned in this scenario, though at least the first two have flirted enough with libertarian ideas to be as likely unpalatable to the right as the left.

More: Larry Solum (emphatically not a right-wing shill) drops the hammer too. (Link via Randy Barnett, who is taking this on over at Volokh's place.)