Senator Schumer is fond of saying that his test for confirming a Supreme Court Justice is that the nominee be in the mainstream. Well, it looks like Mr. Schumer couldn’t even pass his own test.

That’s the message we take away from yesterday’s vote to end debate and allow an up-or-down vote on the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Just 25 Senators joined the filibuster effort led by Senators Kennedy and Kerry, and Mr. Schumer was in that extremist minority, along with his New York colleague, Senator Clinton. Mr. Schumer is just as much a left-winger as Senator Clinton in this vote, and both of them are out of touch with middle America, and even with the mainstream of New York’s legal community, which realizes that Mr. Alito is well qualified.

You didn’t have to be an extremist conservative to vote against the filibuster of Alito. Both of the Democratic senators from Mrs. Clinton’s old home state of Arkansas, Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor, opposed a filibuster. So did Senator Lieberman of Connecticut, Maria Cantwell of Washington, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, and Bill Nelson of Florida. The vote was 72 to 25 in favor of ending the filibuster. Senators Lieberman and Rockefeller and Cantwell and Nelson are well within the Democratic mainstream. And Mr. Alito will probably be confirmed to the high court with fewer than 72 votes. But Mr. Schumer himself has said that it is a different standard to filibuster a judge than simply to vote against him.

Experience has taught us that the small minority doesn’t always have the worse argument. But given that Mr. Schumer has made so much of the times that Judge Alito has voted in the minority – suggesting that it disqualifies him from the Supreme Court because he is “out of the mainstream” – it’s an interesting twist of justice to see Mr. Schumer ahoist by his own petard.