The inestimable Joe Bob Briggs over at Taki's Magazine offered a resounding cri de coeur wishing heartily that supreme court judges were drawn more widely than from the Ivy League. He also wishes the partisan nature of the court could somehow be minimized. I sympathize, I really do. The trouble is that even if judges of towering Olympian integrity actually exist, they would nevertheless be slashed by a thousand cuts of partisan ferocity during the confirmation process.
That's just how it works now, and attempts to roll back partisanship in the process are, I'm afraid, doomed to failure. For the major parties to attempt this would be seen as unilateral disarmament in the boiling culture war of the present moment, and rightly so. Predictably I view Democrats as being far more venal and vicious in their integrity free blistering panic to prevent a largely conservative court than Republicans would conversely be, but they are not immune to the tendency either.
That said, I'm entirely confident that it simply does not matter who the jurist in question is if he was nominated by Trump, even if the nominee was a transgender card carrying member of the Socialist Worker's Party and wore a pussy hat to the hearings. By the same token if Obama had nominated, say, Ben Shapiro, Republicans would likely take a dim view of the move. They wouldn't have Borked him into oblivion like Democrats would, but they wouldn't have been thrilled simply because Obama nominated him. Democrats might have been aghast, but would have publicly joined the NRA before they dared stymie the will of Saint Obama of Kenwood.
In any case we are well and truly stuck with rampant partisanship in the nominating process. We can bemoan it all we like, but we can't simply cash out and go home in high dudgeon because the game will continue without us. The stakes are much too high for us to decline to play. What does worry me is that after this particular confirmation auto-da-fé it may be hard to find anyone worth more than a pitcher of warm spit to volunteer for the savagely corrosive and disheartening process.
