The Wages of Falsity

With his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court at least one thing has become clear: Mr. Obama is not now by any stretch of the imagination a liberal, but someone of the conservative leaning center-right. That's better than having an ultra-rightwing ideologue as President, but by how much? It's also worth noting that of the Catholics now on the Court, four — Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito — are ultra-rightwingers, and the fifth, Kennedy (who, let's not forget, was Reagan's back-up for Bork), as a sometimes swing vote obviously disappoints his original constituency. Setting aside the, to me, tremendously interesting question why in theory Catholic jurists would tend to be conservatives, in practice the Catholic Supremes have repeatedly demonstrated that they are mainly interested in two things: "how do we figure out what the rule is?" and "how do we get around the rule?" They have little to no interest in using notions about justice to determine what the rule of law should be.