When He’s Right, He’s Right

Patterico on Bush sending some of his most unqualified wingnut appointments back to the Senate again: “polls show that Americans like cautious judges who hew closely to the text of the Constitution and relevant statutes.” Indeed! So I think we can all agree then that the court needs fewer justices, who will, say, invent a heretofore unknown (and utterly inconsistent with the past jurisprudence of said justices) right to have ballots counted in the same manner, claim that it doesn’t apply to any future cases, and then fail to provide a logical remedy even in the case under discussion after the court’s favored litigant got what he wanted. Or, say, discover in “not so much for what [the 11th Amendment] says, but for the presupposition…which it confirms” a concept that state governments should have similar immunities against their citizens as 17th century British monarchs, hence leaving rights without effective remedies. And so on and so forth.

This idea that because the public will agree with nice-sounding platitudes about judicial restraint that no remotely sophisticated legal observer could think that justices appointed by Republicans adhere to in any meaningful way that they therefore want radical right-wingers rated unqualified by the ABA appointed to the federal bench cracks me up almost as much as the “Glenn Reynolds is a nonpartisan libertarian” routine.

…I also agree with Mitch McConnell that Dems should treat Bush’s nominations they way they treated Clinton’s…