WITH THE Senate out this week, Judge Charles Pickering’s embattled nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit is getting help from seemingly unexpected sources.

The first is a February 17 editorial in the Washington Post. The Post editorial page is a neoliberal one and if pressed to pronounce yes or no on the nomination, might, after many nuanced paragraphs, come down politely no. But the Post routinely sticks up for due process–fairness, in a word. And so in this editorial the Post, after making sure the reader knows that Pickering wouldn’t have been its choice for the Fifth Circuit, goes after “the liberal groups and Democratic senators” who’ve been trying “to portray him as a Neanderthal [on race]–all the while denying they are doing so.”