Obama: Oh, hey, sorry about that whole thing where I filibustered Samuel Alito

Heh. It was funny when it was Chuck Schumer, hilarious when it was Hillary. This? Gold, Jerry! Gold!

President Obama “regrets” filibustering the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in 2006, his top spokesman said Wednesday, though he maintains that the Republican opposition to his effort to replace Justice Antonin Scalia is unprecedented. “That is an approach the president regrets,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said. Obama and the Democratic senators who joined him in filibustering Alito “should have been in the position where they were making a public case” against the merits of his nomination to the high court instead, Earnest said. “They shouldn’t have looked for a way to just throw sand in the gears of the process," he added. As a senator from Illinois, Obama and 23 other senators attempted to stage a filibuster to block a confirmation vote on Alito, one of former President George W. Bush’s picks to serve on the bench. The filibuster bid failed and Alito was confirmed. Conservatives have seized on Obama’s filibuster vote to accuse him of hypocrisy for criticizing Republicans for saying the next president, and not Obama, should nominate Scalia’s successor.

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He regrets it all right, not because he thinks it was wrong to do but because it's causing him a problem now. I regret that you all remember it and I can't explain it away is more like it. Yet in the same breath, Earnest tries to insist the two are not the same because the Republicans are vowing to stop any Obama nominee before they even see who it is. Well. If that's the case, then why the regrets? Why not just make the case that Alito was (at least from Obama's perspective) a particularly awful choice for a Justice and the filibuster was simply an attempt to prevent a bad Justice from getting on the Court? Two reasons: First, that's all the Republicans are doing now. You can try to make a distinction if you want between filibustering a known nominee you don't like and vowing pre-emptively to oppose any nominee. But everyone knows the latter is based on the surely accurate presumption that Obama would nominate someone who shares his view of the Constitution. If he wants to nominate an originalist conservative, sure, no problem. Does anyone think he's going to do that? You might say, hey, why should he when he's a liberal? Understood. And for the same reason he felt justified in opposing Alito, why should today's Senate Republican majority rubber-stamp the liberal justice everyone knows Obama will pick, when the result would be a swing in control of the court's majority that for all anyone knows could last a generation? Does anyone seriously doubt that if Democrats had controlled the Senate in 2005, Obama would have voted with the majority to deny confirmation of Bush nominees every chance he got? (In fact, his record of participation in Democrat filibusters against Bush's lower-court appointees removes any doubt.) Democrats are trying to say the issue is the presumed Republican position that he need not even bother making a nomination because they're just going to bottle it up. That's why I've been saying since Saturday the Republicans should tell him to go ahead and make a nomination if he wants to - but understand that if he nominates someone who shares his disdain for the Constitution, he'll be wasting everyone's time, particularly his own. And what's this about Obama going on a national tour to beat up the Republicans on this issue? Talk about a waste of time. If you know you can't win a fight, then why turn the fight into gigantic national tour? You only do that if politics is, and has always been, your only real priority in this whole thing. And anyone who looks at Obama's history on this issue can figure that out easily enough.