Incumbent GOP Senator Jon Kyl, currently facing a tough challenge from Democrat Jim Pederson, contradicted his own role in the effort to deepsix Harriet Miers' Supreme Court nomination Monday when he attacked Democrats for "routinely obstructing [judicial] nominations from coming to a vote" in his weekly National Ledger op-ed column. In the piece Kyl claimed that "for more than two hundred years, even the most controversial of presidential judicial nominees had been given the courtesy of a vote" and that Democrats had broken that tradition in recent years. But, as Time wrote in April 2006, Kyl is believed to have "led a behind-the-scenes effort to undermine the nomination" of Miers. As many may remember, Miers withdrew her nomination after weeks of conservative outrage and before the Senate could come to a vote on her.