I am trying to broaden my blog-reading habits, and today, I found my way over to Balkinization, a legal blog. Friday, Jack Balkin wrote about a Slate piece on the moderate and liberal academics who thought, during his confirmation process two summers ago, that John Roberts wouldn’t be a right-wing ideologue as chief justice. They’re left looking a bit foolish now, after the spate of hard-right decisions last week, and given the statistics that show Roberts votes in complete agreement with Antonin Scalia 89 percent of the time and with Clarence Thomas 85 percent of the time.

The Slate writer, Emily Bazelon, chalks it up in part to the personal relationships the academics had with Roberts. They knew the guy, they liked the guy, they couldn’t imagine him being an ideologue, ergo, he wouldn’t be, end of story. The academics also thought the debate should be about judicial temperament and the kind of judge who should be on the court, and not about ideology. Because they knew Roberts and they liked Roberts and couldn’t imagine the man they knew being an ideologue, he was a fine choice as far as they were concerned. We saw something similar during the Alito confirmation debate. Alito impressed senators with his measured demeanor, and that was good enough for most of them. Never mind that whole strip-search thing, and everything else we knew he believed in.

(Some observers, Bazelon writes, supported Roberts—or to be precise, didn’t oppose him—because presidents have, by virtue of their office, a right to shape the courts as they see fit. This was, to a certain extent, the Russ Feingold position: Someday a Democrat will be president again and because we want that president’s choice to be confirmed, we don’t want to oppose this nominee this time.)

What the nice-guys-won’t-be-ideologues attitude toward the Roberts and Alito nominations was missing, of course, was any damn connection to political reality. Given the track record of the Bush White House, it was absolutely clear that Roberts and Alito were being placed on the court for ideological reasons number one, and that whatever was number two wasn’t close. Daddy Bush learned a hard lesson with the Souter nomination, when a judge he thought would be one kind of cat turned out to be another. Junior wouldn’t have nominated either Roberts or Alito had he not known how they were going to rule on the issues dearest to his wingnutty little heart. Which is the essence of Balkin’s point, if I’m reading it correctly: Bush made clear what his judicial philosophy was, and because he had a majority in the Senate, he knew he could get the justices he wanted. Anybody who thought he might settle for something less was simply ignorant of political reality. I’m proud to say, for what it’s worth, that I wasn’t ignorant of that reality. Neither were you, probably. (Damn shame we didn’t have a vote.)

The good news is, Balkin notes, that the next court confirmation fight, if it occurs while Bush is still in office, will take place in a far different political arena. Bush won’t have absolute power to get the guy he wants, although it may not stop him from nominating this generation’s version of G. Harrold Carswell—Nixon’s fuck-you-all nomination after his preferred candidate for an open seat failed to win confirmation in 1969—just to spite the Democrats. But that’s another post entirely.