For long stretches, the only drama in the hearings was whether she could say, once again, that she couldn’t answer without betraying any impatience with senators asking the same thing over and over again.

The rationale for this, going back to Ginsburg, is that a judge can’t comment on matters that might come before the court, a category so capacious that it includes pretty much anything of public interest.

This is much too far-reaching a standard. It’s one thing to commit to vote a certain way in a given case, which we shouldn’t want any judge to do; it’s another to conceal basic views on the law — for instance, was Roe v. Wade wrongly decided or not? — behind a curtain of judicial impartiality.

On top of this, the Ginsburg rule renders what a nominee will talk about completely arbitrary. We know a fair amount about how Barrett views gun rights because she wrote a dissent in a notable gun case and couldn’t avoid discussing it. But if she could talk about that in some detail, why not other important questions?