I suppose Specter "switching" sides was the event to which Souter's decision to announce now will be attributed.  After all, I've seen responsible reporting (I think it was The Blogger Formerly Known As Kagro X, a day or two ago) indicating that to resolve Specter holding Ranking Member (Repub) seats on his committees, Inouye will leave Appropriations, Leahy will move to chair Approriations and Specter, as the new ranking Democrat on Judiciary, will wind up chairing Judiciary.  (Inouye is getting quite old and, it needs be remembered, was both close to Ted Stevens and, it would seem, didn't clothe himself in glory helping Bush and Cheney bury money for wiretapping, datamining, torture, secret hit squads and similar in the budgets year after year.  He's got issues which make dubious his staying in charge of Appropriations.)  This, I suspect, is likely to happen after the Coleman-Franken race is decided, possibly (I speculate) by Coleman conceding after his money gets cut off and the Republicans then have to deal with seating Franken.  The play would be the Repubs not opposing (and even welcoming, politely) Franken, and the Dems both reshuffle and not exert exceptional pressure on the Repubs re committee assignments and ratios.

I also saw responsible reporting, I guess about a month ago now, that indicated Leahy had gone in to the S.Ct. building for an unscheduled meeting with Souter.  And that he'd gone there unannounced and sans entourage.  Anyone familiar with the geography of Capitol Hill knows that walking from the Senate (or a Senate office building) to the Supreme Court is closer than going to your corner store.  They are literally across the street from each other.  Your walk to get lunch is likely longer.  But Senators don't just drop in on Justices.  The speculation then was that Leahy was getting an I'm-going-to-retire heads-up from Souter, as this came about the time justices' law clerk hiring is ordinarily completed and he hadn't done any.

Let's get to the core of this, though.  

Dawn Johnsen, who I think is an exceptionally excellent nominee, will never be confirmed.  I commented - when her name was announced in ... January - that I wanted to wait to see whether she was being sent out as a sop to the left or was an indication of the real direction of Obama justice policy.  Given (a) the positions DoJ has taken in the trio of wiretapping/torture/state secrets cases pending in California (Mohammed v. Jeppsen, al-Haramin, and Epping v. ATT, IIRC) - which positions Obama dishonestly blamed on court schedules and holdovers during his press conference Wednesday, (b) the inaction so far by Obama and the WH w.r.t. pushing Johnsen's nomination (they're just leaving her out there), © Specter's opposition to her and likely ascension to Judiciary Chair, and (d) the likely choice of a woman to the S.Ct.* leads me to conclude that I think the cynical view was correct.  Money party wins over people party, again.  I wonder how it feels to come to be agreeing with Dick Cheney.

* Above the Law handicaps Sotomayor and Kagan as the locks for the job.  Kagan has shown herself to be a reed waving in the wind as evinced by her ease in adopting the war on terra language in her confirmation hearing.  Sotomayor has been mentioned as an S,Ct. nominee since the first Clinton administration with that based largely, it would seem, on her gender and ethnicity.  To my eye, she has not distinguished herself on the 2d Cir.  

I have to wonder what all the screaming mob of reflex liberals in the blogosphere will have to say when the Specter side-switching they hailed Tuesday yields the guy who sheparded judicial appointments for both Bushes and who took his place at Bush's side like a whipped cur after a primary winds up wielding a pre-announcement veto over all judicial and DoJ appointments under Obama.  Seemingly half of Specter's news conference switching sides he devoted to bitching about Republican ideological purity and the unfairness of primaries (in N.M., where a "moderate" Repug was taken out by their base forcing a contested primary which compelled the moderate to burn up all their money in the primary, shifting control to 50-49-1 as opposed to 51-48-1 and leading to "I could have been Chairman of Judiciary and 70-something judges could have been  confirmed and weren't").  And whether and what the screaming mob of reflex liberals' reflective capacity (already showing some stunting when looking at Obama) will yield when they consider that someone to whom they attribute 11 dimensional chess skill in making subtle moves that change the landscape has spent literally months (and his VP choice, years) on effecting the result of turning Specter.  This was not an accident, people, and trying to pass it off as anything less than intended is merely an exercise in denial.

Net result:  no change.  Just the way the money party likes it.