Writing in The New Republic, Andrew Sullivan says he thinks Bush would pick moderate conservatives who would sail through committee hearings and bend this way and that way once on the court. This is precisely the problem with Republican picks for the court. The blunt way to say this is that he made it up as he went along, erasing the line between law and politics. What was within living memory an intellectual discipline is now politics, and a simplistic, highly partisan form of politics at that. One reason is that the legal world is dominated by the activist left.
Enormous pressure is brought to bear against dissenters.
Opinion at the law schools, which are increasingly devoted to freewheeling judicial activism, matters a lot to members of the judiciary. The American Bar Association is now a conventional liberal pressure group. One dean told the AALS meeting she would be reluctant to hire a professor opposed to abortion because she felt her faculty would be unwilling to interact with anyone who wasn't pro-choice. Yes, conformity is always less troublesome. The upshot is that Democratic presidents can be fairly sure of what they are getting when they name someone to the court.