From zendari-
"If the candidate was truly on the fringe, he/she wouldn't get the votes required. What are you afraid of?"
It's called Party discipline. As it is, if the candidate weren't fringe, then they'd have no trouble getting 60 votes, either, which would indicate a strong consensus in their favor. Which is really what we need in the court system, to maintain the credibility of the ultimate arbiters of justice in our country.
Here's something I composed elsewhere, pretty much sums it up-
Quite frankly, I see it as a mark of poor character for any appointee to take the offered position if Senate rules have to be broken to put him there... If that wouldn't make one feel ... dirty, I don't know what would...
Partisanship is all fine and good, but at some point or another, it's really the duty of the Senate to arrive at true consensus, particularly wrt legacy lifetime appointments. Nor does it matter to me which party is in power wrt this issue- if any nominee can't muster 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, then they don't meet that consensus threshold, and should rightfully be rejected for the good of the country as a whole...
Somewhere here, it seems to me that the meaning of the term "Conservative" has been lost, when the "Conservative" leadership is willing to discard the rules and throw out decades of precedence just to have their own way, right now, and to saddle the country with ideologues in permanent tenure in the court system... doesn't seem very "conservative" to me, at all...