Fresh off a drubbing in the 2002 midterm elections, Schumer and a Democratic minority sought to invigorate their liberal base by changing all of that. Leaked internal memos indicated that the Democratic opposition was predicated on the fact that if confirmed, this brilliant young Hispanic conservative would be catapulted onto the shortlist for a Supreme Court nomination. On that assumption, they were likely correct. At the time, Schumer understood that he could not base opposition to a judicial nominee on politics alone, so the stated reason for his opposition relied on the thinnest of gruel. Despite earning a “well-qualified” rating from the American Bar Association—the legal gold standard and seal of approval—Senate Democrats argued he wasn’t qualified.

As a young legislative correspondent at the time, I staffed my then-boss, Minnesota’s freshman Republican Senator Norm Coleman, as he drew the much-despised overnight shift on the Senate floor to protest the Democratic blockade of Estrada. The hope was that after loud protests, moderate Democrats would defuse the escalation before judicial nominations became trench warfare. Alas, despite 55 senators voting to end the blockade, Democrats sustained the filibuster—as they would with Estrada on an additional six separate occasions. He was forced to withdraw his nomination, and a new age of partisan filibuster was born. Within two years, Schumer’s tactic would be deployed to torpedo nine more of President George W. Bush’s nominees.

Predictably, the misuse of the filibuster led to an existential threat to the filibuster itself. To confirm President Bush’s embattled judicial nominees, then-Majority Leader Bill Frist threatened the “nuclear option,” that is, changing Senate rules to ban the use of the filibuster in certain instances. A bipartisan group of senators known as the “gang of 14” de-escalated the situation by voting to confirm most of the filibustered nominees, staving off such a fundamental change to Senate procedure.