I’m no great admirer of Justice Stephen Breyer’s unprincipled pragmatism, but I’m astonished to see that FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten asserts that Breyer’s professional qualifications at the time of his nomination to the Supreme Court in 1994 were “average” or “middling”—and that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, by contrast, was “perfectly qualified.”

Let’s consider Breyer’s qualifications (which I draw from his Wikipedia entry):

Fourteen years as a First Circuit judge
Longtime law professor at Harvard
Leading expert in administrative law
Member of U.S. Sentencing Commission
Chief counsel to Senate Judiciary Committee
Supreme Court law clerk (for Arthur Goldberg)
Undergraduate degree from Stanford; Marshall Scholar; law degree from Harvard

It is no disparagement of Justice Ginsburg to note that it is difficult to see on what basis anyone would rank her qualifications at the time of her nomination as “perfect” and Breyer’s as only “middling.” (Yes, she had much more litigation experience, but Breyer had experience in the executive and legislative branches that she didn’t have, and his other credentials matched or exceeded hers.)

Enten’s bizarre characterization, I’ll note, comes in the course of a blog post in which he tries to model factors that predict the likelihood that a Supreme Court nominee will get confirmed. I’m very skeptical that this sort of modeling has any value. But even those more inclined to credit this approach ought to wonder what sort of junk data it’s built on if Breyer’s stellar qualifications are characterized as “middling.”

(I’m of course divorcing qualifications from judicial philosophy throughout this post.)