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The Senate deal worked out by 14 moderate Republican and Democratic senators may look official and sport an official sounding name -- "Memorandum of Understanding on Judicial Nominations" -- but America and the U.S. Constitution were hoodwinked. Yep, they pulled a quick one all right. We actually were able to see the Constitution being literally hijacked, yes, heisted right from under our very noses.

Some in the Senate felt that the institution was dangling dangerously on the precipice, like Senator Robert Byrd -- absolutely the last senator to be interested in protecting the rights of the minority voices of America. Yet there he stood in the well of the Senate claiming that minority views in the Senate would be silenced by this "tyranny" of the majority.

But was America precariously perched on the edge of the abyss? Byrd urged his fellow senators to "Step back from the precipice because America would suffer incalculable damage." Yet it was Byrd and the other determined Senate distracters who wanted a deal they could hardly wait to make. They had absolutely nothing to lose. After all they were in the clear minority. So the Democrat moderates offered their deal to the Republicans, which would also send President Bush a clear and concise message... "Don't mess with the minority party... you may have the votes but we have the will and 'The Deal'." This deal was brought to America courtesy of the 14 Senate Constitution-nators!

So it didn't matter that the Democrats could not understand that they didn't win the majority of the seats in the Senate and if they didn't have the votes required to win then they should have just sat back and accepted defeat and plotted for the 2006 senate elections. Instead, they convinced seven Republicans to accept, and even embrace, the notion that there is a clause in the Constitution (but not any rule book I've read) that says, "take a vote and the one with the lowest number of votes gets to make the rules." It just doesn't happen that way, and for Stall-O-Crats and Constitution-nators who behave like spoiled children, that's tough medicine to take so they looked for ways around the rules, and indeed they found it in "The Deal."

Conservatives thought that we had won. After all there had been a presidential election, and it was carried in all the newspapers. CBS even covered it. But something odd happened on the way to the public forum... Suddenly it did not matter that the Advise and Consent Clause of the U.S. Constitution had called for an up or down vote.

Article II of the Constitution is clear. It provides "The president shall nominate, and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint...Judges of the Supreme Court and all other Officers of the United States."

The Constitution clearly gives the president the absolute right to nominate judges not the U.S. Senate. That's why the White House and Senator Frist insisted upon a call for an up-or-down vote -- that's the say-so that the Senate gets. It's called Checks & Balances. (Check the Constitution -- like the spaghetti sauce commercial says, "It's in there!")

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