It’s funny. I don’t remember any senators — including Democrats — asking that Samuel Alito apologize to African-Americans and Latinos for allegedly belonging to Concerned Alumni of Princeton, an organization opposed to affirmative action and dedicated to the proposition that women and minorities didn’t belong on the Princeton campus. Alito had bragged about belonging to the group when pursuing a promotion in the Reagan Justice Department but conveniently lost all recollection of it during his confirmation hearing.

Nor do I remember anyone in the Senate asking John Roberts to apologize to Latinos for a tacky and condescending remark in a 1983 memo he wrote while working for Reagan White House Counsel Fred Fielding. Alluding to Reagan’s support for amnesty for illegal immigrants, Roberts suggested that readers of a Spanish-language magazine would be glad to hear the Reagan White House supported a proposal to “grant legal status to their illegal amigos.”

And if you go back further, I doubt that anyone asked the late William Rehnquist to apologize for what people testified under oath were his efforts to suppress minority voter turnout as a young lawyer in Phoenix in the 1950s and ’60s.