President Bush’s proposal for ending the gridlock over the judicial confirmation process in the Senate comes at a curious juncture. With Americans about to decide whether they want to revoke the Democrats’ control of the Senate, the president yesterday told members of the American Bar Association that he was proposing a “clean start” for the process of nominating and confirming judges. He wants judges preparing to retire to give the president a year’s notice. He wants himself and future presidents to be bound to nominate a successor within 180 days, and the full senate to vote on each nominee within 180 days after that, after hearings that the Senate would be bound to hold within 90 days of receiving the nomination. In other words, if a judge in fact submits advance notice of his or her plans to retire, the system would greatly enhance the chances of his successor being ready to mount the bench as soon as the outgoing judge steps down.

Senator Leahy, who has been the source of much of the mischief on the Judiciary Committee and will go down in history for his crabbed and partisan chairmanship, was noncommittal on Mr. Bush’s proposal, though the president went out of his way to cast the issue in non-partisan terms. He said the procedure he was proposing should apply “now and in the future,” no matter who is president or which party controls the Senate. Quoth he: “We must return fairness and dignity to the judicial confirmation process.” Senator Leahy, according to a report we saw on the New York Times’ Web site, gave forth with a declaration about how he was willing to discuss “meaningful consultation, ideological balance and a depoliticizing of the judicial nomination process.” But if one judges by, say, Senator Schumer’s recent maneuvering, what the Democrats mean by ideological balance is “no conservative need apply.”

Our own view of the problem of the gridlock over judges is that the voters know what they’re doing, and when they hire one party to run the Executive Branch and another to run the Congress, it reflects a serious division in the country over the underlying issues — a situation in which the makeup of the appeals courts takes on an outsized importance. It’s not going to be easy to paper over these deep divisions by addressing procedural concerns. The right way to deal with this is for the Republicans to press more cogently the substance of their arguments over the divisive issues of taxes, vouchers, social security, health care and the like. And to pursue control of the Senate. The proposal made by Mr. Bush yesterday has its attractions, but the whole problem will appear in a different light if the Republicans can prevail on November 5, regaining the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee. Then they will get a hearing and a vote for the nominees Messrs. Leahy and Schumer have been stonewalling.