There is a perfectly simple solution to the impasse over a handful of President Bush's judicial nominations that is hurtling the U.S. Senate toward meltdown. It's that old political standby, compromise.

Despite all the guff they have taken from the White House and from conservative pitchmen as obstructionists and worse, Democrats have not stood in the way of the overwhelming majority of the president's nominees. The Senate has approved 205 — far more by this point in the Bush presidency than dug-in Republicans had allowed to proceed during Clinton's tour.

Senate Democrats, resorting to the filibuster that requires a 60-vote majority, have balked only 10 Bush picks, all for appellate benches — and all for cause, as either too thinly qualified or as bearing records that fix their jurisprudence far outside the mainstream.

Democrats are not demanding that the president name, in their place, liberals. There were none among those 205. Mainstream conservatives would be whisked into their judge's robes as fast as customers in a cut-rate clothing store. The president is being asked only to play in bounds.

Bush won't hear of it.

Republican appointees already dominate the federal judiciary. Seven of the Supreme Court's nine justices are Republican. Ten of the 13 appellate courts have GOP majorities and it appears that 12 will before Bush is through.

The game now is different. The aim is to push beyond customary partisanship and to begin spiking the judiciary with hardcore right-wingers who can be counted on to advance an activist, reactionary agenda that would re-criminalize abortion, mix government and religion, dismantle environmental protection and quash defendant rights — among other chores in the right-wing job jar.

In the service of that goal, GOP senators have been psyching themselves up for a scheme that would dismantle the filibuster and clear nominees for approval on a straight party-line vote. Democrats threaten, in retaliation, to snare the Senate's business endlessly in procedural traps, and an argument that was already ugly has just become incomparably more vile.

The GOP is joining with religious-right organizations to miscast Democratic opposition to the 10 appointees as an attack on faith.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has signed on with the so-called Justice Sunday event that is rallying a number of religious-right groups and figures. The organizers claim that the filibuster is being used against ‘‘people of faith'' and that Democrats are, as the head of the sponsoring Family Research Council says, out to ‘‘rob us of our Christian heritage.''

Republicans earlier had charged, absurdly, that Democrats were variously anti-women, anti-Hispanic and anti-Catholic when they opposed judicial nominees who incidentally fell into those categories. Those slanders have now been giantized into this encompassing slander that is crude, dangerously divisive and, not unimportantly, simply dead wrong.

No decent political party has any business taking part in such demagoguery.

Is there no point at which President Bush will ask himself just how deeply he is willing to see his party debase itself for the dubious cause of installing fringe rightists in the courts rather than respected conservatives?

Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers.