Sometime next week President Bush will nominate someone to take Sandra Day O'Connor's seat on the Supreme Court. In the meantime, the chattering classes will guess about whom the president will choose. Black, white or hispanic? Man or woman? Moderate or conservative?

It would be surprising if President Bush nominates someone who is less than a stalwart conservative. You'll be able to tell how conservative the nominee is by how incoherent Sen. Ted Kennedy is in denouncing him or her. So, if Kennedy doesn't appear to be sloshed, then we're in trouble.

On a slightly more serious note, I fully expect whomever is nominated to be filibustered. The Washington Post has already revealed that no one Bush might nominate would be acceptable.

Democrats signaled that whoever the nominee is, their three likely lines of attack will be to assert the White House did not consult them sufficiently, then paint the nominee as ideologically extreme and finally assert that the Senate had not received sufficient documents about the candidate. [emphasis added]

Democrats do not believe that a conservative president has the right to nominate someone who shares his ideological views. Clinton nominee Ruth Bader Ginsberg -- an unabashed liberal and former general counsel of the ACLU -- was approved 96-3. Steven Breyer was approved 87-9. Antonin Scalia was OK'd 98-0.

Those days are gone. On "Fox News Sunday," president of the liberal Alliance for Justice, Nan Aron, claimed, without any basis in fact other than her own wishful thinking, that President Bush had no mandate to nominate a conservative to the court. Of course, during both the 2000 and 2004 campaigns, Bush repeatedly vowed to nominate justices in the Scalia/Clarence Thomas mold -- and that's what his supporters expect of him.

Republicans have nominated seven of the nine justices on the court; unfortunately that doesn't make it a conservative court. The American people expect a more conservative court -- that's why they keep on electing Republican presidents.