Jack Shafer writes:

Everybody is two-faced about the Supreme Court.

First, they fuss about the court having become a venue for politics. This was the position Justice Sonia Sotomayor took last month. Someone who votes reliably with the minority of justices who were appointed by Democratic presidents, she received a chorus of hallelujahs from her comrades when she worried aloud during oral arguments in an abortion case that if the court did not decide her way in the case, the institution might not “survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts.”

The same people who hallelujahed Sotomayor last month have done a 180 this week. With Justice Stephen Breyer abdicating from the court, they’re urging the president to appoint a hardcore Democratic partisan to the court, the harder the better. It’s hypocritical to condemn politics on the court and simultaneously insist on partisan nominees, but Democrats aren’t the only ones who swing this way. At her swearing-in ceremony last year, Justice Amy Coney Barrett promised that she would separate her political preferences from her judicial rulings. But if a Republican resided in the White House, you know what sort of nominee Barrett would be plugging for on the sidelines.

Justice, as we’re frequently told, is supposed to be blind. But court seats have never been filled by blind picks. “A judge is a lawyer who is a politician who has a friend,” Judge Paul Leahy once told his then-clerk Floyd Abrams, piercing his way to the truth. Liberal presidents pick liberal nominees and conservative presidents pick conservative ones. It’s built into the system. Filling the Supreme Court with partisan nominees is one of the reasons parties campaign so hard to win the presidency! [Continue reading…]