Sonia Sotomayor, in contrast, will never, ever, ever surprise you in that way: She will always rule however progressive activists and Democratic politicians want her to rule. She is an activist, meaning a judge who does not reason toward a conclusion but instead reasons backward away from the conclusion, securing the political outcome and then backfilling in the legal arguments, however flimsy or preposterous, as necessary. Justice Sotomayor will always and everywhere deliver the political goods, the law be damned.

The Republicans of course beclowned themselves in the Jackson-confirmation spectacle, because that is what Republicans do now. Imagine if one of them had told the plain truth: “What we want is Supreme Court justices who follow the text in the manner of Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas, not justices who invent implausible crap in order to come to the decision preferred by the party with which they sympathize, in the manner of Justice Kagan and Justice Sotomayor. With respect, we don’t think you are that, both because of your record on the bench and, frankly, because of the fact that if you were that, then Joe Biden would never have nominated you in the first place. So, most of us are going to vote against your confirmation for that reason. That doesn’t mean we think you are stupid or that your résumé isn’t impressive, which it is. But we think that the word ‘qualified’ in this case entails more than having gone to Harvard Law — it also means understanding some fundamental things, like the fact that we write laws down for a reason, and acting in accordance with those understandings. Now, if you want to try to convince us that we are wrong about you, we are all ears. But we’re probably not wrong.”