Throughout most of the Constitutional Convention, the power to appoint ambassadors, judges and other officers of the United States was vested solely in the Senate. It was decided late in the convention that the Senate should share the appointment power with the president. Clearly, the framers expected the Senate would have an equal say in appointments.

Several nominations for positions in the executive branch have been rejected over the past two centuries. Even more nominations for life-time appointments to the judiciary have been rejected because such nominations are for life and they are nominations to an independent branch of government.

For many years rejections were often carried out by the informal process of senators withholding "blue slips" for nominees from their home states. When a senator did not return a blue slip approving the nominee, the nomination was killed without a vote by the full Senate. It was a method for insuring the president sought the "advice" of the Senate and senators before nominating a person for the judiciary. The result was that only qualified moderates were usually appointed to the bench.

Utah's Sen. Orrin Hatch ended the "blue slip" practice. Sen. Hatch also began the practice of "filibustering by committee chairperson" nominees proposed by President Clinton. He simply refused to hold hearings on nominations even where senators from the nominee's home state approved of the nomination.

More than 60 Clinton judicial nominees were not even accorded the courtesy of a hearing during the Hatch chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee. They were never given the chance for an "up or down vote" by the full Senate. For Sen. Hatch to now object to the use of a filibuster to halt nominations is less than disingenuous.

Contrary to Sen. Hatch's representations in his Tribune op-ed piece last Sunday, Republicans led a filibuster of the nomination of Justice Abe Fortas to the position of chief justice in 1968. I watched the filibuster. When a cloture vote failed to muster the necessary super majority to end the debate after four days of the filibuster, Justice Fortas asked to have his nomination withdrawn.

The modern divisiveness in the Senate over judicial nominations is directly traceable to the Senate's partisan treatment of judicial nominations beginning with Justice Fortas. The level of divisiveness has been increased by President Bush. He threw down a partisan gauntlet by renominating several contro- versial candidates not confirmed by the prior Senate.

The main qualifications of these candidates appears to be their appeal to the religious right and their rigid ideological views calling into question their capacity to judge objectively contentious issues coming before the courts.

The Bush administration apparently believes that the Senate should simply rubber-stamp nominees it selects without Senate advice, much less the consent of a sizeable majority of the Senate. Slogans like seeking the appointment of judges who will not "make law" are trumpeted while President Bush nominates persons who will "make law" - law of the sort advocated by his administration and its closed-minded right-wing supporters.

Because of the nature of the job of judges, the framers of the Constitution vested the Senate with a co-equal power over the nomination and confirmation of persons for life-time appointments to the judiciary. The Senate's role is not a subservient one of rubber-stamping anyone the president nominates unless it is found that they are an ax murderer or child molester.

This was made clear in the Federalist Papers, numbers 76-78. Over the past two centuries, the Senate developed a number of checks on both the president and members of the Senate to prevent the president and a majority of the Senate from running roughshod over those with substantial objections to nominations made by the president.

The result, until the first Bush administration and Sen. Hatch's chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee, has been negotiation and compromise over judicial nominees and the appointment of qualified moderates to the bench for the most part.

The present dispute over whether to eliminate the filibuster as a device to block nominees that a sizeable block of senators finds objectionable presents a further and dangerous erosion of the Senate's advice-and-consent function.

The Republicans hold a 55-to-45 majority of the seats in the Senate. The Republican majority represents approximately 47 percent of the United States population, while the 45-member Democrat minority represent 53 percent of the population. Senators representing less than a majority of the population are advocating the complete ceding of the advice-and-consent function to any president with a numerical majority of the membership of the Senate from his or her own political party.

The end result of the political campaign to further weaken, if not eliminate, the advice-and-consent function of the Senate, will be to establish powers similar to those of the English monarch in 1789. The founders expressly sought to avoid this result by requiring the independent advice and consent of senators in the nomination and confirmation of important executive branch positions and lifetime appointments to the bench.

For Republicans to repudiate that role of the Senate, especially after their sorry record in dealing with the judicial nominees of President Clinton, is not only the height of hypocrisy, but is a dangerous precedent they will live to regret.

This is not the time for political opportunism, presidential arrogance or misleading op-ed pieces by Sen. Hatch. It is a time for members of the Senate to begin to act responsibly when carrying out their advice-and-consent function rather than further erode an important institutional check upon executive branch power and a majority party in the Senate that does not represent a majority of the American people.

John J. Flynn is professor of law emeritus at the S.J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah.