Washington ? The election is over; the battle for the judges has begun.

Karl Rove, President Bush’s chief political strategist and architect of victory, did a masterful job. He urged the president to run a national campaign reminiscent of President Harry Truman’s famous whistle-stop campaign of 1948, even though this was not a presidential election year. Democrats were taken by surprise. No president has ever campaigned so hard and so aggressively in an off-year election.

Rove urged the president to concentrate on a nation-at-war theme that took the focus off of the faltering economy and falling stock market. And he urged him to send out on the campaign trail moderate surrogates such as former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. to assure voters ¢ especially women voters ¢ that they had nothing to fear from a conservative GOP.

But the day after the election, most of the Republican talk was about judges ¢ conservative judges. U.S. District Judge Charles Pickering and Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen had been rejected for higher office by the Senate Judiciary Committee, then controlled by Democrats. Their re-nomination is now all but guaranteed, according to Republican senators.

Other judicial nominations have been held up by the Judiciary Committee, including Miguel Estrada and John G. Roberts, both nominated for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and six nominees for the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. All of these judges have strong social conservative credentials, which is code for pro-life credentials.

Democrats cannot prevent a Judiciary Committee vote on these and other like-minded nominees, but the full Senate can because 60 votes are required for cloture, the means by which debate is cut off. Continuous debate ¢ known as a filibuster ¢ used to involve senators reading from dictionaries and novels until they could no longer stand. Today, by mutual consent, senators now acknowledge the existence of a filibuster without requiring senators to actually talk until they drop.

Even so, Democrats notably did not filibuster the nomination of Clarence Thomas, a judge widely viewed as anathema to social (read pro-choice) liberals. And President Bush has said that Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia are the two judges he most admires.

This is why a battle is looming. Supreme Court openings are sure to come up, and vacancies on other federal courts abound. Will the president nominate moderates and avoid a fight, or will he nominate Thomas-Scalia clones? Will Democrats block all such nominees or give in on some and pass on others? Some senators adhere to the view that a president should be able to nominate people of his own political persuasion, others note that the Constitution requires the Senate to be an equal partner in the appointment process. There are enough of the latter to guarantee a battle.

Prediction: A series of contentious judicial hearings are on the horizon. We may even witness old-time filibusterin