Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol falsely claimed that “Democrats do not want to permit President Bush to put conservatives on the bench.” In fact, as Media Matters for America has noted, the Senate has to date approved 205 judicial nominees, with Senate Democrats filibustering 10.

Just last week, the Senate confirmed Paul Crotty as a federal district judge by a vote of 95-0. Following the confirmation vote, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary committee, noted: “The vast majority of the more than 200 judges confirmed during the last three and one-half years were confirmed with bipartisan support.” In addition, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) noted on an April 10 appearance on Fox News Sunday that Democrats have allowed the Senate to vote on the vast majority of the president's judicial nominees, despite the conservative ideology of many of these individuals:

We have approved 204 judges [as of April 10]. Ninety-eight percent of those don't agree with me on hardly anything, or most Democrats. They are almost all pro-life. They are almost all extremely conservative. That's who the president has nominated. He said he was going to nominate judges through the prism of [Justice Antonin] Scalia and [Justice Clarence] Thomas, and yet we've approved 204 out of 214.

From the April 17 broadcast of Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday:

KRISTOL: But basically, the Democrats do not want to permit President Bush to put conservatives on the bench because the bench -- the courts -- is one of their last bastions of liberalism. And this is a test of whether Republicans are serious about governing or not.