Eighteen hours and more than 700 questions later, Judge Samuel Alito's inquisition has ended.

And despite all the wailing and gnashing of teeth by the Democrats, it seems as if he will be confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

There won't be a filibuster. There will probably be delays and obfuscations, but he will be confirmed.

And frankly, he should be.

By all accounts - and by all accounts I mean the Democrats couldn't find anybody to say mean stuff about him - Alito is eminently qualified.

He has the intellect. He has the judicial temperament. He has the judicial philosophy. He has it all.

But, gasp, he might be a conservative.

And for heaven's sake we can't have any more of "those people" on the court. It might tilt the court to the right.

You know what? That's absolutely correct. Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts might tilt the court to the right.

To that, I only have one observation.

So what?

That's the way it works. When the Democrats have the White House and a vacancy on the Supreme Court arises, they can tilt the court to the left

That's what they did during the Clinton administration when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was nominated.

Ginsburg expressed sympathy for the position that there is a constitutional right to prostitution and polygamy.

She opined that perhaps the legal age of consent be lowered to 12.

She attacked the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts as organizations that perpetuate stereotyped sex roles.

She proposed abolishing Mother's Day and Father's Day and replacing them with a single Parents' Day.

She called to an end to single-sex prisons because, if male prisoners are going to return to the real world where men and women must function together, they might as well learn how to deal with women while in prison.

She also said that an imbalance in the racial makeup of an employer's workforce justified court-ordered quotas even if there was no intentional discrimination by the employer.

(Of course, she operated an office for more than 10 years in a city with a black majority, yet never once - in 50 hires - offered a black person a job.)

Alito doesn't have any baggage like that.

Yet the Democrats will vote no.

They don't really care if he's qualified. They don't care about his judicial temperament or his intellect.

He might be conservative, so they'll vote no.

The Ginsburg vote was 96-3.

When John Roberts was confirmed last September, there were 22 "no" votes and I would be willing to bet there will be more than 22 against Alito.

I think the Republicans are just a little too nice to Democrat Supreme Court nominees.

They need to be more like the Democrats - threatening filibusters, calling nominees radicals.

Senator Ted Kennedy proclaimed that Samuel Alito is a radical. Yeah, Kennedy actually said that.

Funny thing about Ted Kennedy. Every time I see him on television, I wonder if he's sober.

And while he was questioning Samuel Alito, I couldn't help but think of the irony.

Here we have a squeaky-clean nominee being vilified by a lecherous geezer.

Honestly, if you or I would have behaved like Kennedy, we'd have done some serious time in prison.

Even though I was only 11 years old in 1969, I still remember seeing the news on about Kennedy and his trip into tide-swept Poucha Pond on Chappaquiddick Island near Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts.

After an evening of partying. Kennedy's mom's car wound up upside down in the pond. He got out of the car. His passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne wasn't so lucky.

Kennedy claims he tried to save her.

Kennedy left the scene and went back to the party. A couple of his buddies returned to the scene with him. Still unable to get the girl out of the car, the young revelers went home to sleep it off.

Nobody called the cops.

Passersby found Kennedy's car the next morning, the dead girl still inside.

Kennedy was criticized for driving drunk, for failing to come to Kopechne's aid, for failing to summon help, for contacting not the police but his lawyer first, and for failing to report the accident to the authorities.

Kennedy entered a plea of guilty to a charge of leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury. He received a sentence of two months in jail, which was suspended.

Nice.

New York's Democrat Chuck Schumer also was a particularly acerbic jerk during the hearings. He was hammering on Alito because he listed membership in the Princeton Alumni Club on a 20-year-old job applications.

Some members of that group - not Alito - wrote racist articles back in the 1970s and 1980s.

Of course that makes Alito a racist. You know, guilt by association.

That's abject nonsense, of course, but hey, Schumer's an important guy.

He's currently the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, part of the Democratic Senate Leadership Committee.

That outfit is responsible for raising funds and recruiting Demo candidates for the 2006 Senate election.

A couple DSCC staffers illegally obtained a copy of the credit report of a Republican senatorial candidate.

They posed as him and used his social security number.

Of course, Schumer, who has not been implicated, knew nothing about it. Whatever happened to guilt by association?

The staffers are under investigation by the FBI.

Nice.

It's no wonder Judge Alito's wife was reduced to tears during these hearings. [[In-content Ad]]