For the Republicans to say it's not about ideology is going to sound hollow.

If Bush is re-elected, I would suspect several justices would step down in the next four years.

Is Justice Scalia, but maybe with a smile and a little more polite and less temperamental.

It's got new members and big cases, and the combination of those things will make it historic.

It strikes me as quite unusual that she would have a process unlike that for any other one under consideration.

Bush won and got re-elected, and the Senate got more Republicans. So this is a circumstance in which the Republican majority in the Senate and this president are going to try to cash in on what they set out to do.

The norm is to do as much of a background check as possible to prepare yourself for all possible attacks. They did not do that here.

There are a number of relatively big cases already. These and other upcoming cases will test some important characteristics of the [Chief Justice William H.] Rehnquist court, one I think still remains fractured along ideological lines.

This was an incredibly high-profile case -- one could not even imagine a more high-profile case -- and look at the fact that we had this major screw-up.