The inquisitor: Charles Schumer, leader of the anti-Bush crusade.

MINUTES before the Senate Judiciary Committee began hearings on the nomination of Miguel Estrada to the federal bench in 2002, Democratic senator Chuck Schumer of New York was introduced to Estrada's mother. She informed the senator that when she was living in New York four years earlier, she had voted for him over the incumbent Republican, Alfonse D'Amato. "I hope you'll repay the favor," she added.

Schumer chuckled at her request. He took his seat, gaveled the hearing to order, and delighted in proclaiming her support. Then he proceeded to do everything in his power to avoid repaying the favor: He demanded sensitive documents, gave voice to accusations that Estrada was a right-wing nutjob, and speculated about the nominee's honesty: "I think we have some credibility problems here." At one awkward moment during his persistent badgering of Estrada, the senator snapped: "This takes a yes or no answer if you're being truthful with this committee."

This colorful performance was vintage Schumer--hungry for whatever scraps of publicity Estrada's mother might confer upon him, but also committed to the crafty partisanship that has made him one of the Senate's most belligerent Democrats. "There's a lot we do not know about Miguel Estrada," Schumer said at the hearing--even though Schumer himself apparently knew enough to condemn the man, just a few days earlier in The Nation, as "a Stealth missile--with a nose cone--coming out of the right wing's deepest silo."

Chuck Schumer is New York's other liberal senator. Whereas Hillary Rodham Clinton may be more important to her party's long-term ambitions, Schumer is undoubtedly more significant to its near-term goals: He is perhaps the key Democrat sitting on the Senate panel that soon will weigh in on the nomination of Judge John G. Roberts Jr. to fill the first Supreme Court vacancy in more than a decade. In this regard, he is more important than chairman Patrick Leahy, more critical than attack-dog Ted Kennedy. "He's the smartest guy they've got," says Todd Gaziano of the Heritage Foundation.

There may not be a better embodiment of the career politician than the 54-yearold Brooklyn native. After scoring a perfect 1600 on his SAT test, Schumer went off to Harvard and stayed there through law school. Returning home, he decided to skip the bar and run for the state assembly instead. He was all of 23 years old at the time. He won that election, in 1974, and has been on the public payroll ever since, never losing a race as he climbed his way up from the backbenches of Albany to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1980 and, finally, to the Senate in 1998.

It's possible that Schumer won that initial Senate election because he had the good fortune of being called a "putzhead" by his GOP opponent. In what was perceived to be a nip-and-tuck race, the media had a field day as D'Amato first tried to deny using the Yiddish slur, but then was forced to admit that it had in fact escaped his lips. His campaign never recovered.

And Schumer never looked back. For his re-election last year, he raised more money than any other politician in the country except for George W. Bush and John Kerry--an impressive display of financial hustle that scared off just about every potential Republican candidate. Even his critics credit him with boundless energy. "The guy is tenacious," says one New York politico. "A shark can't stop swimming, and Schumer can't stop giving press conferences." When Steven Malanga of the Manhattan Institute wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed proposing that Miguel Estrada challenge Schumer in the 2004 election, the senator actually rang him up. "He wanted to berate me and tell me how wrong I was about this terrible ideologue," says Malanga. "He didn't seem to understand that I was half joking."

Press conferences and phone calls give Schumer the opportunity to pursue one of his favorite pastimes: grandstanding. He first gained notoriety in Washington with his brash crusade for gun control. "We are going to hammer guns on the anvil of a relentless legislative strategy," he declared in 1993, hours after a Long Island shooting. "We are going to beat guns into submission." Schumer can be especially strident on abortion. When Congress was debating a bankruptcy bill, he pushed an amendment to ban pro-life activists from avoiding fines by declaring themselves insolvent. These special rules would not have applied to animal-rights protesters or anyone else, and the controversy surrounding them wound up blocking a piece of sensible legislation for years. (It finally passed in March, without Schumer's meddling.)

Politicians are often good at hogging the spotlight, but Schumer is one of the best. It is a Beltway clich, to say that the most dangerous place in Washington is between a television camera and such-and-such a lawmaker--but the comment has been made about Schumer with more frequency than anybody else. "Sharing a media market with Chuck Schumer is like sharing a banana with a monkey," said Democratic senator Jon Corzine of New Jersey earlier this year. "Take a little bite of it and he'll throw his own feces at you."

Years ago, Hill staffers invented the verb "to Schume," which means to take credit for the accomplishments of others. This usually assumes the form of legislative boasting, but former Republican congresswoman Susan Molinari once described a particularly audacious version of it. She and Schumer used to appear together on a local TV program dedicated to New York politics. On the day Molinari was planning to tell viewers that she was pregnant, she got Schumed: Before she could say anything, Schumer hauled out a baby gift. "I was announcing being pregnant," Molinari complained to the New York Times, "and Chuck stole the line."

Recently, Republicans have been stealing lines back from Schumer. That's because before the Bush presidency, he spoke forcefully on the urgent necessity of confirming judges with all deliberate speed. In 2000, Schumer said that the GOP-controlled Senate was taking too long to debate the qualifications of President Clinton's nominees. "I also plead with my colleagues to move judges with alacrity--vote them up or down," he said. "This delay makes a mockery of the Constitution, makes a mockery of the fact that we are here working, and makes a mockery of the lives of very sincere people who have put themselves forward to be judges and then they hang out there in limbo."

Since Bush's election, however, Schumer has been all about mockery, doing his best to keep limbo fully populated with Bush nominees. (Estrada dwelled there for more than two years before he withdrew.) Unfortunately, these holdups haven't improved any of the debates over qualifications. Schumer's own contributions have been notably lacking in high-minded objectivity. "He's willing to say anything," says one senator on the Judiciary Committee. When Janice Rogers Brown came before them in 2003, for instance, Schumer ignored the fact that California voters had elected her overwhelmingly to the state supreme court, and branded her a radical: "It's obvious to me that many of the president's judicial nominees want to return us not just to the 1930s, but to the 1890s," he said. This spring, as GOP senators discussed ways to break Democratic filibusters, Schumer unleashed even hotter rhetoric: "The ideologues in the Senate want to turn what the founding fathers called the cooling saucer of democracy into the rubberstamp of dictatorship." He added that Republicans "want to make this country into a banana republic."

Yet Schumer has done far more than pop off in front of microphones. He has embarked on a careful strategy of blurring the fundamental distinction between judging and politicking. In 2001, he chaired Judiciary Committee hearings on whether ideology should play a more open role in confirmations. Previously, senators have focused on the professional qualifications of court nominees rather than their political beliefs, which is why a known liberal such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg was able to secure a spot on the Supreme Court with only three Republicans voting against her. With Bush in the White House, however, Schumer decided to try changing the ground rules. One of his mentors in this exercise has been University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, author of the forthcoming book Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts are Wrong for America.

If Democrats want to evaluate nominees on their legal views, Republicans shouldn't object. What Schumer proposes doing, however, is evaluating nominees on their political preferences. This is something else entirely, and it is a natural outgrowth of legal realism, an academic movement that claims laws aren't neutral rules so much as tools of power. By the time Schumer sat in Harvard's lecture halls, variants of this idea were firmly entrenched there--and it is the chief intellectual doctrine behind the judicial activism that liberals applaud and conservatives abhor. It essentially says that judges are no less political than politicians. Therefore, confirmation hearings should not be dispassionate episodes of advice and consent, but raucous quasi-elections that engage the interests and urges of the public. (Taken to its logical endpoint, this school of thought ought to demand that Supreme Court justices appear on national ballots--something that Brigham Young University professor Richard Davis actually calls for in his new book, Electing Justice.)

Schumer cloaks these views about ideology by saying he simply wants to avoid extremes. "People on the far left [and the] far right want to make law," he said on Meet the Press in July. "Neither of them should be on the bench." The presumption, of course, is that senators possess the impartiality to determine what's mainstream and what's not. "If he thinks that he can set aside his liberal ideology and make these choices," asks Republican senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, "then why can't judges do the same when they're ruling on the law?"

Perhaps Bush nominees should just start saying that they plan to apply the same Solomonic wisdom that Schumer claims to bring to his own job--in a sense, they could Schume Schumer.

On second thought, maybe that's not such a good idea.