From NRO’s excellent house editorial today, “After Souter”:
The Democratic Senate will be a rubber stamp for Obama. Republicans should nonetheless press for an extended debate about the extent to which judges have supplanted self-rule and the role of modern liberalism in that slow-motion coup.…
Republicans have grown attached to their own misbegotten theory of judges: that presidential picks deserve deference so long as they have the right credentials and no major ethical lapses. This political norm made sense in an era when judges stayed within their constitutional authority. In our time, it makes constitutionalist senators complicit in the erasure of the Founders’ legacy.