Quite a panic seems to have erupted at the prospect that the Senate might actually end the ability of the Democrats to filibuster even highly qualified nominees for the federal courts. No sooner had the majority leader in the Senate, William Frist, sent plans to join a broadcast to engage what its backer, the Family Research Council, calls an effort “to engage values voters in the all-important issue of reining in our out-of-control courts” than the Washington Post issued an editorial calling the whole thing “beyond the pale” because conservatives are characterizing the Democrats’ effort as a “filibuster of people of faith.”

Senator Schumer is so upset about this that he has asserted that the head of the Christian conservative Family Research Council, Tony Perkins, is “un-American,” a phrase that hasn’t been flung with such venom since Old Joe Poole was wielding it against the communists. The senator characterized Mr. Perkins as saying “it’s people of faith versus Democrats” and went on to say, “The founding fathers put down their plows and took up muskets to combat views like that – that one faith or one view of faith should determine what our politics should be.”

We don’t think Mr. Schumer actually meant to encourage someone to lay down the plow and go shoot Mr. Perkins, but clearly the senator ought to take a long drink of lemonade and lie down for a bit. Because the left is at a fever pitch, and no doubt this is but the beginning of a long showdown. We are in a period in which the Democrats – having lost control of not only the White House but both houses of the Congress – are turning to the worst sort of demagoguery to protect their hold on the judiciary.

There are those of us who had hoped that the Democrats would have recoiled from what they did back in 1987, when they sank the nomination of one of the greatest jurists ever nominated to the Supreme Court, Robert Bork. Yet as the voters have moved in one direction, the Democrats have moved in the other. Judge Bork was stopped by a vote of 58 to 42, after a contentious committee hearing. During President Bush’s first term the Democrats signaled that they were going to be indifferent to the judgment of the Judiciary Committee itself and block even up-or-down votes on the floor.

This is what Mr. Perkins and his colleagues on the right are facing. Their candidates have not even been able to get a vote when passed out of committee with a favorable recommendation. And we have no doubt that much of it is – as in the case of, say, the nomination of Wm. Pryor – plain old-fashioned hostility to persons who are deeply religious. Judge Pryor had to get a recess appointment to mount the bench. Yet a religious test is forbidden by the constitution; indeed, the prohibition is the most emphatic statement in the Constitution – there shall be “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

No … ever … any. How plain did the founders of America have to be? There’s much fear on the left of the so-called Constitution-in-Exile movement. In a long article stirring these fears over the weekend, the New York Times described this movement as one that encourages judges to strike down laws that don’t appear explicitly in the Constitution. But that strikes us as off the point of the current fight – just ask Ms. Roe and Mr. Wade. Rather, the current fight is precisely an effort to block religious fundamentalists and other so-called values judges from taking places on the federal bench. For this injustice to be corrected by grassroots action of the kind Senator Frist contemplates is as American as apple pie.