court in the mold of originalist Justice Antonin Scalia. The filibuster Soon after President Bush's first inauguration in January 2001, many liberal academics became worried that he would begin packing the federal judiciary with conservative jurists. Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman, writing in the February 2001 edition of The American Prospect, encouraged the use of the filibuster to stop Bush from placing any nominee on the Supreme Court during his first term. In addition, law professors Cass Sunstein (University of Chicago) and Laurence Tribe (Harvard), along with Marcia Greenberger of the National Women's Law Center, counseled Senate Democrats in April 2001 "to scrutinize judicial nominees more closely than ever." Specifically, they said, "there was no obligation to confirm someone just because they are scholarly or erudite." On May 9, 2001, President Bush announced his first eleven court of appeals nominees in a special White House ceremony. There was immediate concern expressed by Senate Democrats and liberal groups like the Alliance for Justice. Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer said that the White House was "trying to create the most ideological bench in the history of the nation." From June 2001 to January 2003, when the Senate was controlled by the Democrats, the most conservative appellate nominees were stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee and never given hearings or committee votes. However, after the 2002 mid-term elections in which the Republicans regained control of the Senate by a 51—49 margin, these same nominees began to be moved through the now Republican-controlled Judiciary Committee. With no other way to block confirmation, the Senate Democrats started to filibuster judicial nominees when they came before the full Senate for final consideration. This forced supporters of the nomination to move to invoke cloture, which, if agreed to by a three-fifths supermajority vote, would allow debate to end and force a final vote on confirmation. On February 12, 2003, Miguel Estrada, a nominee for the D.C. Circuit, became the first court of appeals nominee ever to be filibustered. Later, nine other conservative circuit court nominees were also filibustered. These nine were Priscilla Owen, Charles W. Pickering, Carolyn Kuhl, David McKeague, Henry Saad, Richard Allen Griffin, William H. Pryor Jr., William Myers III and Janice Rogers Brown. Three of the nominees (Estrada, Pickering and Kuhl) withdrew their nominations before the end of the 108th Congress. The “nuclear option” As a result of these ten filibusters, Senate Republicans began to