Writing in The New York Sun on the eve of the election in November, Jack Newfield argued — shrewdly, in our estimation — that what the election was really about was taxes and judges. The Congress, after all, had already authorized the war. How the president read the decision of the voters with respect to taxes was the front-page story around the country yesterday. But late in the day Mr. Bush also gave his answer on how he read the voters on judges. He sent back to the Senate the names of Judges Pickering and Owens, both rejected when the Senate was in the hands of the Democrats. He also sent over again the conservative lawyer Miguel Estrada, along with a number of other prospective judges who would not have stood a chance had the voters not revoked the Democratic Party’s control of the upper chamber.

This is a moment to remember one of the great lessons of those who have considered the long view of American politics — which is that our system has a way of freeing men from the errors of their past. How else to account for the career of, say, Hugo Black. No sooner was he confirmed to sit on the high court than a contretemps erupted over the fact that he had once been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet he went on to become one of the greatest defenders of individual liberty ever to sit on the high bench, not to mention the fact that he also emerged as our greatest proponent of what we like to call the plain language school of law. When he stepped down, shortly before his death, the New York Times, in a memorable editorial, called his judicial career “eloquent testimony to the proposition that few things are less predictable than the consequences of a Supreme Court appointment.”

It’s not just judges, of course. One of our favorite cases is Harry Truman. “This town,” the man from Independence once wrote about New York, “has 8,000,000 people, 7,500,000 of ’em are of Israelitish extraction (400,000 wops and the rest are white people.)” That was from a letter to his cousin, Mary Ethel Noland. When Truman penned a letter to propose marriage to the woman who would become celebrated as First Lady Bess Truman, he actually wrote: “Uncle Will says that the Lord made a white man from dust, a nigger from mud, and threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I. It is race prejudice, I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion that Negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia and white men in Europe and America.”* Yet with all this, Give ‘Em Hell Harry went on to become what many view as our greatest civil rights president, by issuing two historic executive orders desegregating the armed forces and instituting fair employment practices in the civilian branches of the federal government.

It may be surprising, but no more in our view than, say, the spectacle of eight justices of the Supreme Court — not to mention the court press gallery — falling into rapt silence last year as Justice Thomas spoke on the meaning of the Virginia cross-burning case. Here was a justice who had been not only mocked before acceding but ridiculed for his silences after he mounted the bench. Suddenly when he spoke the whole system fell back in awed respect. What a contrast to the received wisdom. What a triumphant moment. It’s the kind of thing to mark as the Judiciary Committee gets ready to sit on Judges Pickering and Owen and Mr. Estrada and the rest of the new nominees. If these candidates finally get their approval by the Senate, the results in the coming years may surprise us all. There’s plenty of precedent.

* The quotes from Truman’s letters are in “Truman and Israel” by Michael Cohen.