A hack. Also shady is the conservative “watchdog” group FACT, or Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, which Whitaker ran from a mostly virtual Washington address to gather dirt on Hillary Clinton, Merrick Garland and other G.O.P. enemies. This isn’t illegal. It’s just scummy and disreputable and indicative of the world Whitaker inhabited before his sudden elevation.

A crackpot. Whitaker was asked in 2014 to name “some of the worst decisions in the Supreme Court’s history.” He did not mention Dred Scott v. Sandford, the worst decision ever. He did not mention Plessy v. Ferguson, the second worst. He didn’t even mention Roe v. Wade or Griswold v. Connecticut, the abortion cases reviled by the Christian right to which he belongs.

Instead, he named Marbury v. Madison, which, he lamented, made the Supreme Court “the final arbiter of constitutional issues.” This is not a quarrel with a ruling. It is an objection to the system. We have an acting attorney general who does not believe in the Constitutional order of which he is the chief legal officer.