Though they have lacked the charged atmosphere that the former governor of Massachusetts, William Weld, brought to his fight to become the ambassador to Mexico, two recent nomination battles show the same meanness of spirit in the Senate as Mr. Weld’s fight last summer. It is a situation that will grow worse unless members of that body grow beyond the strategy of grudge politics.

The nominations of Dr. David Satcher for surgeon general and Bill Lann Lee for assistant attorney general for civil rights — the nation’s top civil-rights job — have been postponed, perhaps indefinitely, because of a lack of Senate support. Nothing wrong with the Senate taking its role in the confirmation process seriously, but the reasons offered for rejecting these names demonstrates that senators are less concerned with specific qualifications than with denying the president an opportunity to carry out the agenda for which voters elected him.

Democrats have brought on much of this problem themselves, most notoriously with Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination during the Reagan administration and later with John Tower, nominee for defense secretary under the President Bush. The protests against Mr. Bork’s ideology, in particular, understandably galled Republicans. Now, the current president can barely fill the position of junior assistant associate, second class, without GOP senators thundering against a real or perceived shortcoming.

Dr. Satcher, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is being opposed in the Senate for reflecting the president’s position on late-term abortion: he supports a ban only if it made an exception to save the life or health of the mother. Mr. Lee, whose work as a mediator for the NAACP has become well-known since his nomination, has been blocked because his views on affirmative action align with those of the president’s. GOP senators say the opinions of both nominees are outside the mainstream of American thought. They forget the mainstream elected the person whose views they represent.

The path of obstructionism chosen by Senate Republicans leads inevitably off a cliff. Sometime in the near future, a Republican will regain the White House and face a Democratic Senate, which could adopt blocking White House nominees as its primary reason for existence. A Republican administration will say how unfair that is, but instead of raising the names Bork and Tower, senators will talk about Satcher and Lee. The arguments won’t make any sense then, just as they don’t make any sense now.