The busy little bees in the Senate confirmed the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit today.

White House aide Brett Kavanaugh won Senate confirmation as an appeals judge Friday after a wait of nearly three years, yet another victory in President Bush’s drive to place a more conservative stamp on the nation’s courts.

Kavanaugh was confirmed on a vote of 57-36, warmly praised by Republicans but widely opposed by Democrats who said he is ill-suited to sit on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

In a statement, Bush said Kavanaugh will be “a brilliant, thoughtful and fair-minded judge.”

The usual suspects were less pleased.

“It’s clear that he is a political pick being pushed for political reasons,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy (news, bio, voting record) of Vermont, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “This is not a court that needs another rubber stamp for this president’s exertion of executive power.”

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Ralph Neas, president of the liberal-oriented lobbying group People for the American Way, said that Bush and Senate Republicans “have succeeded today in putting a partisan lapdog into a powerful, lifetime position on the federal bench. Brett Kavanaugh has spent his career as a partisan operative, carrying out the will of the Bush administration and twisting legal arguments to benefit his political ideology. “