Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is under fire for violating Senate rules. During a speech last week, the Nevada lawmaker alluded to what he called a "problem" in a confidential FBI report on a judicial nominee.

Senate rules prohibit mentioning or alluding to any confidential or classified information when debating an issue on the Senate floor. According to Standing Rule of the Senate 29, Section 5, any senator who does so "shall be liable ... to suffer expulsion from the body." Senator Reid apparently violated that rule in referring to an FBI report on Judge Harry Saad, a nominee to the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

"Henry Saad would have been filibustered anyway. He's one of those nominees," the Democratic senator stated. "All you need to do is have a member go upstairs and look at his confidential report from the FBI, and I think we would all agree there is a problem there." ...

Tony Perkins, president of the Washington-based Family Research Council, says Reid's remarks show "blatant disregard" for the confidentiality of the Senate and "misuse" of privileged FBI information. "Senator Reid made uncorroborated and ambiguous claims to smear the reputation of Judge Saad," Perkins says in a press release. "[Reid] is clearly using desperate tactics in his effort to continue his unprecedented use of the filibuster against well-qualified judicial nominees."

Manuel Miranda of the National Coalition to End Judicial Filibusters was outraged at Reid's action. "The one nominee singled out for this sort of humiliation and embarrassment is the first Arab-American ever nominated to the appellate court," he notes. "It is shocking to me -- so much so that I couldn't type yesterday in anger."

Miranda echoes those sentiments. "He should be censured by his colleagues. He should be," he says. "The penalty for talking about a classified, confidential matter like he did, in the Senate rules, is expulsion. That is how seriously the Senate has ... taken this matter [in the past]."

Miranda should know. He lost his job working for the Senate when he allegedly made public some Democratic memos that called for the filibusters of nominees simply because they were Latinos, black women, and pro-life Christians.

The second Hatch ethic was more revealing. In Committee meetings, he restated the golden rule: we should do to others what we would want others to do to us. I knew, upon hearing this, the solipsistic quality of Hatch's thinking and just how misguided the situation was. The golden rule is indeed a great private ethic, but one that cannot guide those charged with public duty.

...Before Manual Miranda was the head of a group encouraging Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to invoke the nuclear option, he was an aide to . . . Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. And before Manual Miranda was an aide to Bill Frist, he worked as a staffer for Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he used a shared computer network to access Democratic strategy memos on . . . George W. Bush's judicial nominees. ...[S]ome of the Democratic memos were leaked to the press, Democrats and Republicans alike condemned those who accessed the documents without authorization, and Miranda resigned from his job as Frist's top aide on judicial nominees. And now -- what an amazing coincidence! -- Miranda is leading a coalition with a nice, third-party-sounding sort of name supporting Frist's drive to end Democratic filibusters of Bush's judicial nominees.