As absurd as it often feels to have Anthony Kennedy as the last arbiter of everything, in a way we’ve been weirdly fortunate in the court’s long-running 5-4-with-a-swing-vote split. It’s allowed both halves of our polarized republic to feel somewhat represented on the highest court, to feel as if they have at least a fighting chance in the majority of controversies, to feel as if there’s some legitimacy — not a lot, maybe, but some — to the decisions of our unelected guardians. (As much as liberals may hate the Roberts court for Citizens United, it also gave them same-sex marriage and protected Obamacare; as much as conservatives object to Kennedy’s ruling in Obergefell, they’re grateful for his ruling in Hobby Lobby.)

To have the intellectual godfather of the conservative bloc replaced by a liberal appointee would upset this balance, perhaps irrevocably. As it was for a time — and not a happy time — in the 1960s and 1970s, the court would simply become the Enemy to half the country, a vanguard force pulling the political order to the left…

Scalia’s death promises a war like none other between here and November, and an extra layer of insanity in a campaign already defined by radicals and demagogues.

The irony is that this kind of high-stakes collision of law and politics is precisely the thing that Scalia’s legal philosophy strained to curb and check and roll back, by promoting a more limited and humble vision of the Supreme Court’s role in our republic.