President Bush yesterday renominated 20 candidates for federal judgeships, several whose nominations were blocked by Senate Democrats who branded them as right-wing ideologues during the last term of Congress.

The president's action, which made good on a promise announced by the White House in December, precipitated a flurry of truculent responses from Democratic senators.

"The president is at it again with extremist judges," said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. "Last year, the Senate worked to confirm 204 of the president's judicial nominees and rejected only the 10 most extreme."

C. Boyden Gray, a prominent Republican lawyer who chairs the Committee for Justice, a group seeking to help Bush's judicial nominees, countered, "there is nothing extreme" about any of the judges nominated yesterday.

But Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., a member of the Judiciary Committee, said the judges who were filibustered last year and have been renominated "are out of the mainstream and will not be confirmed by the Senate, unless they have drastically modified their views and ideologies."

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said last week that he thought Schumer might be amenable toward one of the first nominees Specter planned to ask the committee to vote on: William Myers III. Myers, the top lawyer in the Interior Department during the first two years of the Bush administration, was nominated for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in San Francisco.

Last year, Schumer said Myers, a lobbyist for mining and cattle interests, had a record that "screams 'passionate activist' and doesn't so much as whisper 'impartial judge.' "

Schumer's remarks made it clear he had no intention of changing his mind.

Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., however, said yesterday that he hoped all the nominees would get a vote from the full Senate. Senate Democrats "obstructed the process during the 108th Congress" by using filibusters to deny "highly qualified judicial nominees a fair up-or-down vote."

Specter issued no statement yesterday, but Senate sources said it was possible that he might call for a committee vote on two nominees — Myers and William Pryor Jr., former Alabama attorney general — as early as Thursday. After Pryor was filibustered, Bush named him to the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit bench as a recess appointment, but that term ended in December.

Since the Republicans now have 55 of the Senate's 100 members, their hand is stronger in attempts to break a filibuster. It takes 60 votes in the Senate to cut off debate.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., has indicated that if Democrats again attempt filibusters, he might seek a ruling from the Senate that 51 votes, not 60, would be needed to stop a filibuster on a judicial nomination.

Frist was unavailable for comment yesterday. In an interview on "Fox News Sunday" he said he might make such a move because it would restore a Senate "tradition of 200 years."

Yesterday, Schumer countered that if Frist took such action it would represent a "nuclear option ... because it will blow up the Senate. We don't know if Senator Frist has 51 yes votes, but it would be a tragedy for the Senate and for the country if he does."

In addition to Myers and Pryor, other previously filibustered nominees targeted by critics yesterday were: California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown, nominated for the District of Columbia Circuit; Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Richman Owen, nominated for the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit; and three from Michigan nominated to the Cincinnati-based 6th Circuit: Richard Griffin and Henry Saad, who are state appeals court judges, and U.S. District Judge David McKeague.