It would be easy, with Samuel Alito now on the Supreme Court, to predict that if another seat comes open before President Bush leaves office the ensuing confirmation battle would be one for the record books.

After all, if Bush did fill a third seat, he essentially would be able to remake the nation’s highest court in his own image.

However, given what we have learned from the confirmation battles over John G. Roberts Jr. and Alito, the idea that Ted Kennedy & Co. might be able to stop another Bush nominee who is similar to those two men might well be more rhetoric than reality.

Last year, before the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist and the retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor, both Roberts and Alito fit the profile of the type of judge who conventional wisdom held would inspire a Democratic battle to the death.

Democratic interest groups had boasted they would never allow Bush to put that kind of justice on the court, much less two of them, or would at the least wage a scorched earth campaign that made the president pay a heavy political price.

That is because with Alito joining Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Roberts on the court, that provides four strongly conservative votes. The swing member is now Anthony Kennedy, who most Democrats have always thought was less inclined toward their legal philosophy than O’Connor, whom Alito replaced.

But should another vacancy occur, it is hard to look at the past six months of Supreme Court politics and conclude that even if Bush gets to appoint what would be the fifth vote on the nine-member court, the confirmation fight would turn out differently.

To borrow a phrase from Saddam Hussein, Bush’s foes predicted the mother of all battles to stop anyone they considered to be a strict-constructionist conservative on the high court. But they could not deliver.

Bush’s opponents could not even muster enough votes to filibuster either man, much less defeat Roberts or Alito on an up-or-down vote.

Candidly, the lessons of the Alito and Roberts confirmations are that Democrats had better either take back control of the Senate this November or get darned close, if they really want to stop the next Bush nominee, should that be in the cards.

And, they had better pray for the health of John Paul Stevens, who is both the most liberal member of the court and its most senior member. He will be 86 in April.

Stevens, who has served on the court for 30 years, spends much of his time at his Florida home. The expectation is that he will wait for a Democratic president before giving up his seat willingly. The court’s next most liberal member is Ruth Bader Ginsburg who will be 73 in March and has been treated for colon cancer.

Yet, the 2008 presidential election is almost three years away. If the Democrats were to win back control of the Senate this year – an unlikely but not impossible task – that would change the dynamics of any Supreme Court appointment.

Republicans currently hold 55 of the 100 seats plus the tiebreaker in Vice President Dick Cheney. History teaches they will lose some of those seats in November and current polls show Americans saying they are in the mood for political change.

Absent such a major electoral shift, however, the Alito and Roberts confirmation fights show that Democrats claiming a nominee is out of the judicial mainstream – which was their argument made against both men – doesn’t cut it. Neither were opponents’ cries that by confirming Roberts and Alito senators were endangering the continuation of legal abortion, which was aimed at energizing Democrats and a handful of moderate Republicans.

Thus, should Bush get another Supreme Court appointment and offer a third conservative who passes the competence test, the Democrats will need to find a new strategy, either that or hope for election gains in November.