Any who were then a good fit for the federal bench remain so, and the fact that Bush's fellow Republicans now hold a slightly larger majority in the Senate may make it easier to have them confirmed over the Democratic objections that had stymied them before.

Those who were ill-considered then are, if anything, a bigger problem now, given that the objections to their nominations are now much better known.

Among those troubling nominations was that of Utahn Thomas B. Griffith for a seat on the key U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia - the Supreme Court's AAA farm team. The shortcomings on his resume have not been resolved by the brief passage of time, and it is unfortunate that the White House and Griffith's patron, Sen. Orrin Hatch, have not seen that.

Griffith had not only allowed his law license to lapse for three years, but also seemed unconcerned about the fact that he might be seen to be practicing law improperly even as he served as general counsel at Brigham Young University.

Griffith hides behind the advice of the Utah Bar Association, which told him that he could continue in his post unlicensed as long as he was working in consultation with licensed attorneys - which, according to BYU, he was. But that legal hair-splitting ignores the fact that the state bar also strongly suggested he remove all ambiguity by taking the test to become licensed on his own - which he did not.

Democrats did not filibuster Griffith's nomination, as they did many others, in part because it came too late in the last Congress. As with the rest of the repeat nominees, there is a solid argument to be made that both the candidates and the president who nominated them deserve the courtesy of an up-or-down vote rather than to be lost in the black hole of Senate procedures.

But Griffith's nomination is also like that of the other deja vu aspirants in that it smells more of partisan fight-picking than of fulfilling the executive and legislative branches' obligation to fill the judicial branch with the best legal minds available. Even Hatch's successor as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter, has said that the speed with which the administration submitted the same names is not in the spirit of proper deliberation.

It is, however, in the spirit of a politically savvy administration that will try to cast the Democrats as hopeless obstructionists when the minority party once again objects to most of these nominees.