So Senator Feingold of Wisconsin, a foe of the federal death penalty, is stalling the elevation of the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Roslynn Mauskopf, to the federal bench. The senator from the Badger State, our Joseph Goldstein reports, has been badgering the Brooklyn prosecutor about how often she requested the death penalty. Mr. Goldstein reports that she brought death penalty charges in 12 cases out of more than 100 in which the law provided that she had the option to do so.

Mr. Feingold has plenty of ways to pursue his campaign against the death penalty. He could have chosen to run for president on an anti-death-penalty platform. His party, the Democrats, control Congress. They could try to repeal the federal death penalty or to reduce the list of crimes for which a person may be doomed. They could pass a Constitutional amendment declaring that the death penalty meets the definition of cruel and unusual punishment under the Eight Amendment, thus triggering, under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, not only a ban on federal death penalty cases but also on the imposition of the death penalty by the states.

The political support exists for none of those steps. Back in 2005 Mr. Feingold did introduce a bill to abolish the death penalty under federal law. It attracted exactly zero co-sponsors and went nowhere. In 2003 he introduced a bill “to place a moratorium on executions by the federal government and urge the states to do the same, while a national commission on the death penalty reviews the fairness of the imposition of the death penalty.” That bill attracted, of the 99 senators other than Mr. Feingold, exactly four co-sponsors. It went nowhere.

A Gallup poll last year found that when asked “In your opinion, is the death penalty imposed: too often, about the right amount, or not often enough?” 51% of Americans said not often enough and 25% said about right. The one successful Democratic candidate for president in the past generation, President Clinton, made a point, while campaigning in 1992, to fly back to Arkansas to preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, who had murdered a police officer. New York’s two senators, Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton, both Democrats, support the death penalty, as does its governor, Eliot Spitzer, also a Democrat.

The only case in which Ms. Mauskopf successfully got a death sentence resulted from the prosecution of the murder of two New York City Police detectives. When Ronell Wilson was arrested, our police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, who was director of the customs service in the Clinton administration and Mayor Dinkins’s police commissioner, said, “if anyone ever needed a justification for the death penalty, this case is it.”

Reasonable people may disagree on the death penalty. We respect those who oppose it for religious reasons or because they feel the chance of an irreversible error is too great, or because, on libertarian grounds, they are skeptical of such a forceful use of power by the state. But no matter what one’s view on the death penalty, it seems incredible that Mr. Feingold would fault a prosecutor or a judicial candidate for imposing a law that is on the books and that is widely supported in the Congress in which Mr. Feingold serves and in the state in which the sentence has been handed down. His real quarrel is not with Ms. Mauskopf — she’s just an easier target — but with the law.