Now the argument against ideologues is raised at a moment in the Supreme Court's history in which the term "judicial activism" is invoked often to cloak sheer ideological orthodoxy. The most illuminating example here is abortion.
There are those -- in sheer scholarship, the commanding presence -- who do not believe that the decision of the Supreme Court on abortion in 1973 was legitimately sanctioned by the Constitution. So: Believing such a thing -- that Roe v. Wade was wrong -- how does a judge rule on derivative questions?
The late Justice Hugo Black was an ideologue. He held that the First Amendment denied to Congress the right to abridge speech, over and out -- and therefore libel laws were unconstitutional. But of course that, as Michael Oakeshott counseled us, is to reason as the crow flies.
My exercised friend believes that ideologues dispatched to the Supreme Court arrive without the disposition, or perhaps even the capacity, to reason productively, and are agents of polarization. This is clearly true of ideologues on the opposite side of the abortion question from Ms. Brown, who reject any modifications on the abortion front that could be held to modify, and therefore to imperil, the basic right to abort.
President Bush would argue that he wants not ideologues but conservatives -- and these call themselves originalists -- to deflect the left's ideological rigidities. The conflict again arises with Miguel Estrada, superbly qualified by every measurement in the legal counting house. And here we have not a black woman, but a Honduran-born star who blazed a path through all the auxiliary chambers of legal learning.
But, says my friend -- Estrada is a right-wing ideologue. And he has been named because he is a Hispanic. His confirmation would enhance the ideological composition of the D.C. court. And that, my friend insists, is bad for liberals and for conservatives.