So the interesting thing about the attempted filibuster yesterday isn’t so much that the Democrats wanted to filibuster Alito.  Given the view that he was unacceptable for whatever reason, they wanted to stop him.  It’s probably a bad precedent - someone like Ruth Bader Ginsburg would almost certainly face a similar effort if she were nominated in the current climate - but not surprising.

What is surprising is that they attempted the filibuster when they knew it would fail.  Why?  Well, one answer is that they were just being Kossite lackeys.  That is, anyone who wants to warm up to the hard left of the Democratic Party, especially if you’re thinking about running for President in 2008, needed to come out in favor of the filibuster.  That probably explains a lot, but it’s not entirely convincing to me.  Explain what electoral successes Kos and his folks have had - why think they’re the force they claim to be?  Maybe you need Kos to win the Democratic primary, but that seems like a big, big maybe, given the lack of any empirical evidence to back it up.  Dean flamed out in the Iowa primary, after all.  (Of course, it might be the case that any number of potential nominees perceive that they need to win over the Kossites to win the primaries).

Another answer would be that the two parties are now so divided with regard to their underlying political philosophies that there really is no common ground.  I don’t think that most conservatives think that Alito is in any way radical or pushing the boundaries of good judicial judgment.  Most think of him as squarely in the mainstream.  The fact that a good number of Democrats (and, perhaps most importantly, their leadership especially) think he is suggests that part of the reason for the attempted filibuster is to demonstrate how firmly they feel about Alito’s views.  They mean to signal here that they think Alito is way out of the mainstream and an attempted filibuster does just that.  (As an aside, the fact that they could only manage a bare majority of their own caucus shows, perhaps, that it’s the Ted Kennedys of the world that are outside the mainstream.)

Finally, though, it might just be a case of what political scientists call ‘path dependence.’ There was probably a point at which, in the last couple of weeks, when some of the Democratic Senators who voted against the filibuster were wavering, unwilling to commit. Perhaps Sens. Kerry and Kennedy thought (not unreasonably) that if they got close to getting the 40 votes they needed, the pressure against those waverers would intensify, even to the point of moving them into the pro-filibuster column.  Imagine you were one of just a couple of Senators who were standing in the way of the filibuster - can you imagine the pressure you’d be under?  And once Kerry and Kennedy committed to the filibuster, they couldn’t back down (at risk of looking more ridiculous than they already did) and once Kerry committed to the filibuster, so too did the rest of the presumed Presidential contenders (Clinton, Evan Bayh, etc.).

All very interesting.