If you collected weighty words during the past week, and agreed to exclude any that dealt with the fractious stock market and with the resurgence of the insurgencies, you would have heard the end-of-the-world talk about the American judiciary. It is worse than astonishing that the thunderclaps focused on only one aspect of the division, betokening as it does the sheer refusal to use one’s eyes or concentrate one’s mind.

Critics of the direction we are apparently headed in use grave language. The senators are on a “collision course.” By this is meant the looming fight on the Senate floor over the filibuster, in which Senator Bill Frist, a Republican of Tennessee, is threatening to use the “nuclear option.”

Mr. Frist will report the Judiciary Committee’s findings on, e.g., Janice Rogers Brown. The committee has approved her by a vote of 10-8. He will submit the recommendation of the Judiciary Committee and ask for a vote.

A voice from the rear: “The senator from Tennessee asks unanimous consent.”

That does it. There being no unanimous consent, the naysayers begin to make their points, all of this done routinely, thus avoiding the kind of stage-arresting apocalypse Mr. Smith went through when he went to Washington. No, this is much, much more genteel – you’re no longer required to carry a catheter. Legerdemain does its work, and the entire house knows if there is any prospect of invoking cloture, which, to succeed, requires a vote deploying all forces in residence.

Changing that rule would mean that the two or three contentious candidates would be awarded their judgeships by a simple majority vote. Viewing the process beginning to end, you have the nominee appointed by the president, submitting to examination by a Senate committee, and voted into office by the majority of the senators.

That doesn’t smell nuclear, but everyone uses the term because changing the number of votes required to end a filibuster means shredding the sheet anchor to windward. The filibuster is held in high esteem as the last refuge against plebiscitary williwaws that storm the popular will, sweeping away venerable threads of sobriety and caution.

That is one view of it. The longer view does rise to nuclear eminence. It is the extent to which the judiciary has assumed the legislative burden.

There are many issues that divide the country’s legislatures, but consider only two of them: abortion rights and civil rights.

In the latter of these, we had a showdown at the law school at the University of Michigan in 2003. The plaintiffs were white students who argued that they were being deprived of equal protection of the law because preference was being given to applicants not because of objective merit, but for the special reason of race. The court by the narrowest majority ruled to okay this anti-meritocratic practice because in future life the lawyers would be contending with mixed race communities, and the only way to prepare them is to replicate that mixture in the law schools.

No one believes that Grutter v. Bollinger is the last word on the subject.

Just when abortion rises to constitutional status is, of course, always being argued, as are other contingencies, like the health of the mother, the rights and responsibilities of the father, the availability of assistance, and the age of the mother.

And yet the candidate for a judicial post is weighed by solid senatorial flanks not on what the candidate might have to say in illuminating legal and constitutional questions, but on how he can be predicted to vote given his background on this issue.

That abdication to the courts of authority to weigh important questions of public policy is infinitely greater in democratic consequence than arrangements by which the majority of the Senate may assert itself, yet it is this, the filibuster, that gets the attention. The correct approach is an intelligent but systematic reduction of the courts’ authority, e.g., to decide at what age a person may be sentenced to capital punishment.