Here are some statements from Chuck Schumer on the Bush Judicial nominees, and the reality behind his statements.  You read them, and you decide.

SCHUMER: "They [Republicans] did filibuster judges, by the way. Paez, Berzon were filibustered in 1999 and 2000."

By definition, a filibuster occurs when a vote of cloture fails, not when it succeeds and a final vote occurs. In the cases of Paez and Berzon, the majority Republicans led by Chairman Orrin Hatch and Majority Leader Trent Lott rejected filibusters against judges and granted cloture, allowing both liberal nominees to be confirmed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where they sit today.

SCHUMER: "But there's nothing in the Constitution that says that there has to be 51 votes for that judge. The Founding Fathers intended the Senate to be the cooling saucer . The point is that there have to be checks and balances here. A check and a balance does not necessarily always mean a majority vote. We have 60 votes before you can do certain kinds of spending increases. The Senate is always supposed to be the cooling saucer."

The Constitution's Advice and Consent clause clearly stipulates a simple majority of Senators to confirm nominees. This has been settled law since U.S. v. Ballin in 1892. This standard is well known and is the only logical answer to why Democrats did not filibuster Justice Clarence Thomas' nomination in 1991.

By contrast, the filibuster appears nowhere in the Constitution. It evolved in the Senate years after the Framers wrote and ratified the Constitution. In other words, the Framers' system of checks and balances did not include the filibuster.

SCHUMER: "One [Bush] nominee said slavery was God's gift to white people."

This is a typical smear tactic: find an extra-curricular speech or article on non-jurisprudential topics such as religious faith, take a sentence out of context, and use it to paint the nominee as radical.

In this case, district court nominee Leon Holmes now a sitting judge confirmed with votes from both Arkansas Democratic senators defended and endorsed Booker T. Washington's view that slavery was a consequence of divine providence designed to teach white people how to be more Christ-like. In fact, nowhere had Mr. Holmes said he endorsed slavery or that slavery was a good institution.

The article at issue, written for a Christian audience, was an expression of his theological belief, shared by Washington, that God could bring good out of evil. So while Washington certainly condemned slavery as evil, having experienced it first-hand, he held a belief that ultimate good could come out of it. Mr. Holmes's article similarly expressed the view that good can come out of evil and that we are called upon to love all men and women.

In fact, Mr. Holmes also wrote his doctoral dissertation on the political philosophies of three major African-American thinkers and activists, W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, and Martin Luther King, Jr. He was an admirer of all three, and wrote favorably of King's achievements in helping to integrate buses, schools, parks, playgrounds, lunch counters, and marriages.

SCHUMER: "Another [Bush nominee] said the purpose of a woman is to be subjugated to a man."

This too refers to Leon Holmes, who co-wrote an article with his wife entitled, "Gender Neutral Language." The article, which appeared in a church newspaper, stated, "The wife is to subordinate herself to her husband," and, "The woman is to place herself under the authority of the man."

However, these statements are derived from the New Testament (Ephesians 5:22-25) and represent the orthodox teachings of his religion, not his view of the law. Moreover, the article contains other statements supporting the equality of men and women, such as "All of us, male and female, are equally sons of God and therefore brothers of one another"; "[T]he distinction between male and female in ordination has nothing to do with the dignity or worth of male compared to female"; "[M]en and women are equal in their dignity and value."

SCHUMER: "One nominee said that there should be no zoning laws. If you have a nice house in a suburban community and somebody bought the house next to you and put in a factory with a smokestack that was polluting, that's not a taking of property."

In San Remo Hotel v. City and County of San Francisco, California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown found a state law requiring hotel owners to pay a large fee to the state if they upgraded their hotels to be in violation of the California Constitution's Takings Clause. She did not claim there should be "no zoning laws" in Schumer's formulation.

Brown wrote, " [T]he facts of this case come down to one thing the City and County of San Francisco has expropriated the property and resources of a few hundred hotel owners in order to ameliorate off budget and out of sight of the taxpayer its housing shortage." This ruling places Justice Brown well within the legal mainstream, and follows U.S. Supreme Court precedents from Nollan v. California Coastal Commission and Dolan v. City of Tigard.

There are many more examples, but it is clear in each of these statements that Schumer is not only distorting the truth, but in several cases making out right lies.  The sad part of this is most people would never know about these obfuscations since the MSM did not do their homework and challenge Schumer on any of his statements.

But today, there are many other outlets for news, and this is from one of them.