President Bush has set his sights on changing the ideological balance on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the most influential appeals court in the nation.

Bush plans to add two judges to the court in the next few months. Vacancies have existed for years, but the Republicans precluded Clinton from making appointments claiming there wasn't enough of a workload to justify more judges.

Now that the Republicans have control of the Senate, they are abandoning that position, and Bush is going to nominate the 12th and 13 judges to the Court.

"The nominations, together with those of two conservative Washington lawyers chosen by the White House last year, give Bush an opportunity to tilt the ideological balance of a court that is surpassed in influence only by the Supreme Court."

"The last two seats on the D.C. Circuit have been empty -- one of them for more than a decade -- because Senate Republicans repeatedly through the 1990s blocked efforts by President Bill Clinton to fill them by contending that the judges would be a waste of taxpayers' money."

"A White House official said Bush considers filling those seats to be part of a revised selection method the president announced this fall to try to accelerate the placement of judges on the federal bench."

This is totally disingenous. Why doesn't he come out and tell the truth, that he's in power and so is his party, and he's going to use that power to overload the federal courts in this country with ultra-conservatives who will be on the bench for the rest of their lifetimes, perhaps 30 years or more, and the rest of us just have to eat it. And that he intends for this to be his legacy.

Read your copies of the Constitution now. Five years from now, although the words may be the same, they most likely won't mean the same thing.