Word is that President Obama will announce his Supreme Court nominee at 11 a.m. You can expect that Obama will trot out some Republican members of the Supreme Court bar who, for their own reasons, will hail the nominee, and you can further expect that the media will proclaim that the nominee is some sort of “moderate,” just as it did for Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Don’t be fooled. A Supreme Court seat is not a prize for excellent brief-writing. Any assessment of qualifications that doesn’t have fidelity to the Constitution front and center is a folly.

Anyone Obama selects is a sure bet to consolidate a liberal majority on the Court that will threaten to write out of existence rights, and limits on power, that are in the Constitution—and to invent Left-favored rights that aren’t in the Constitution. Goodbye, Second Amendment rights. Goodbye, First Amendment speech rights that conflict with codes against so-called “hate speech”—speech the Left doesn’t like. Goodbye to school choice and to religious expression in the public square that clashes with a gross overreading of the Establishment Clause. Goodbye to any meaningful limits on governmental confiscation of property. And so on.

Goodbye, in short, to our Constitution.

It’s rare that the people have any check on a runaway Court. To their great credit, Senate Republicans are determined to provide that check by keeping the vacancy open for the next president.