A funny thing has happened on the way to the confirmation (or filibuster) of Judge Alito. No one seems to be commenting on it, but the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee have broken out with the fantods over Judge Alito’s willingness to side with Justice Scalia in his famous dissent in Morrison v. Olson. That is the 1988 case in which the majority opposed to Justice Scalia gave its stamp of approval to the idea of an independent counsel. So what the minority on the Judiciary Committee is carping about in respect of Judge Alito is that he might not have allowed Kenneth Starr to ruin the presidency of William Jefferson Clinton.

We’re not making this up. These senators were all around as Kenneth Starr succumbed to exactly the temptations of independence of which Justice Scalia warned in Morrison. The court forgot the idea of separated powers. Judge Starr went after President Clinton for years. It got so intense that Mr. Clinton’s presidency became dysfunctional. The record now shows that options to go after Osama bin Laden were withheld from Mr. Clinton because aides feared he was distracted by scandal.

Yet, to judge by the hearings concluded yesterday, the Senate Democrats are eager to inflict another Kenneth Starr on the next president. What else can be gathered from the statement yesterday by Senator Schumer, who, explaining his vote against Judge Alito, said, “What of Morrison v. Olson, which held that the president does not have the total and unfettered power to fire independent officials? Here, too, there is cause for alarm because Judge Alito has stridently endorsed the view of the lone dissenter, Judge Scalia, and refused meaningfully to distance himself from that view in the hearings.”

It’s like some sort of superannuated gyroscope got inside Senator Schumer’s brain and just won’t let it point in a logical direction. And Mr. Schumer is not alone. While the press focused on Roe v. Wade, Judge Alito was badgered for days by our Democratic solons eager to see him side in favor of the constitutionality of the independent counsel statute and against The Great Scalia, who warned so presciently, “Perhaps the boldness of the President himself will not be affected – though I am not so sure.”

This went right by Senator Leahy, a Democrat of Vermont, who maundered, “in the past, you criticized Morrison. Are you saying now that you’re comfortable with Morrison? Do you accept it?” Mr. Leahy followed up, “So do you hold today that the independent counsel statute was beyond the congressional authority to authorize?” Senator Kennedy took up the issue, too, “the point is that you’ve differed with the Morrison and outlined a different kind of a strategy.” Even Senator Biden pressed the case, though at least he acknowledged that Justice Scalia’s dissent “has a very scathing and intellectually justifiable, many would argue, criticism of the test employed by the majority in that case to determine whether separation of powers has been breached.”

We’d like to think that if Mr. Biden was a touch more empathetic it was because, unlike Senators Schumer or Leahy or Kennedy, Mr. Biden still envisions himself one day as president. And as a leader on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as well as the Judiciary Committee, Mr. Biden knows the risk to the national security of an independent counsel sapping the boldness of the president. The same risk obtains, by the way, for the Bush administration in respect of Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation of Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby.

Most Democrats in the Senate as a whole will no doubt line up with their Judiciary Committee colleagues in opposing Mr. Alito’s nomination. But those who, like Senator Clinton, harbor presidential ambitions and who endured the investigations of the Clinton administration may want to find some other grounds to object to the nominee than that he sided with Justice Scalia in defending the boldness of the president. If the Democrats ever regain the White House, they may come to see the virtues of a Supreme Court justice who will protect the president’s prerogatives on the American bedrock known as separated powers.