Yesterday, former New Hampshire Attorney General Kelly Ayotte narrowly defeated Tea Party insurgent Ovide Lamontagne in the state’s Republican senate primary.

Ayotte is hardly a political moderate—Sarah Palin has anointed her a “Mama Grizzly”—but that didn’t keep her from being attacked from the right. One of Lamontagne’s charges against her? Ayotte said that if she were in the Senate she would have voted to confirm Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Lamontagne’s full-on attack on Ayotte for conceding that Sotomayor was qualified to sit on the Supreme Court helped to propel him to within 2,000 votes of the much better-known, better-funded Ayotte. In addition to a lengthy screed on “Obama Judges” on his website, Lamontagne got a leg up from the conservative Judicial Crisis Network, which spent $50,000 on an ad campaign attacking Ayotte for her Sotomayor support.

Never mind that in 2009, a full nine Republican senators voted to confirm Sotomayor—including New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg, who said of the nominee, “Her views and decisions, although strongly stated, are certainly not out of the mainstream of American jurisprudence or political thought."

Cooperating with the president to put moderate judicial nominees on the bench is apparently no longer a legitimate GOP position. Gregg (who is vacating the seat Ayotte is seeking) was one of only five Republicans to vote to confirm Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan this spring. But the Kagan vote was an example of outright bipartisan bonhomie compared with the GOP’s stand on lower court nominees. Fewer Obama nominees have made their way through the Senate than under any president since Nixon—in a large part the result of the GOP’s unified refusal to vote on even those nominees with no Republican opposition.

By the time the Kagan nomination came around, Ayotte had learned her lesson on moderate judicial nominees, and issued a statement panning the Solicitor General. Ayotte’s struggle shows the enormous amount of energy the Right is spending on obstruction as a strategy in itself—and the danger for those who occasionally try saying something other than “No.”