• VENGEANCE IS BRIEF: Arlen Specter, the Senate’s littlest Democrat, has been promised the chairmanship of the Crime and Drugs Subcommittee after the 2010 election. Dick Durbin currently holds the position, which he’ll give up anyway to chair “a newly restored human rights subcommittee,” which was dissolved because everybody on it was too busy to ever go to meetings. The point is this: Specter, in a year and a half, will get to preside over a Judiciary subcommittee, in the hopes that he will not angrily sink President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee this summer. [Washington Post]

Senator Arlen Specter, the newly minted Democrat from Pennsylvania, is officially one of the most junior members of the five Senate committees he sits on, even though he’s a million and a half years old and has spent a million of those years as a senator. The Senate voted unanimously to strip him of his 30 years of seniority accumulated as a Republican because, ha, he is not a Republican anymore. MORE »