WASHINGTON, D.C. -- So far as I have been able to ascertain, I am the only syndicated columnist to take issue with the Republican majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee now claiming that President George W. Bush's nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Miguel Estrada, is Hispanic.

According to my sources and to mounting evidence that I have accumulated, Estrada is actually Japanese. I revealed this startling finding in this space in mid-February; and you can be sure that the humorless Sen. Patrick Leahy, ranking Democrat on the committee, is even now preparing a clever attack on Estrada's veracity before his committee.

Over the weekend, I picked up more information that Estrada is not, as advertised, "the first Hispanic ever nominated for the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia." Rather, he is a gifted linguist -- a Japanese-American fluent in Spanish. I personally witnessed him in broad daylight eating sushi during lunch at a restaurant near his home in Old Town Alexandria. His lunch consisted mainly of tuna.

That ought to get Leahy's blood boiling. The Vermont Democrat is famously touchy about Republicans lying under oath. Not that Leahy is a rigid man, or, as the phrase has it, judgmental. He has accepted some deception and even some lying as permissible.

For instance, a Democratic president not long ago perjured himself; and Leahy was very understanding. Yet, you can be sure that he draws the line when an appellate court nominee, tries to conceal his Japanese heritage with bogus claims to Hispanic blood.

Frankly, I would not be surprised to see all the Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee rise up as one to cite this growing controversy over Estrada's ethnicity as evidence that he is anti-Hispanic. Remember, last weekend I spotted Estrada eating sushi. In fact I may email Leahy my findings.

You might think it implausible for the Democrats to mount a campaign charging that Miguel Estrada is a sushi-eating Japanese-American with a pronounced prejudice against Hispanics. Yet consider Sen. Charles E. Schumer's argument against Estrada. The New York Democrat claims a judicial nominee's ideology disqualifies that nominee when the ideology is not Democratic. Now of course that means that the Senate minority -- which is to say the Democrats -- should decide whom the majority -- which is to say the Republicans -- puts on the court. Schumer, who incidentally is equally as humorless as Leahy, envisages democracy to mean rule by the minority. His claim is implausible even absurd, but he believes it and almost no one has cited the absurdity of the position.