Robert Novak points out today that Republican Sen. Bill Frist quietly threw his main judicial assistant, Manuel Miranda, overboard on Friday in capitulation to Senate Democrats. As Novak says, once again we see who's willing to play tough and who's not. What should have been a major victory for Republicans, as they discovered proof of Democrats conspiring to block judicial nominees, was instead turned into yet another defeat by the gutless GOP.

Says Novak:

By a stroke of luck, Republicans had found a trail of e-mail messages by Democrats that exposed a coolly crafted plan to reject President Bush's federal judges. But Democrats managed to turn their own corruption of Senate confirmations into bipartisan outrage over a staffer leaking a senator's sacrosanct communications.

The Democrats got the Republican pansies in the Senate to dance for them yet again:

Republican senators agreed that the real scandal was the leak, not the leaked material. Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, displaying greater indignation than he ever did about the filibusters, called himself "mortified that this improper, unethical and simply unacceptable breach of confidential files may have occurred on my watch."