I’m not addressing the question of whether a nominee is bound not to provide the type of answers that are in dispute here by the Code of Conduct for U.S. judges. If it is true that they are so bound, then the problem is with the code. Its position is silly. Alt doesn’t even really try to make it seem less silly. It attempts to distinguish between two situations that do not involve a real difference that should concern anyone. It accepts the possibility that a professor with a long paper trail including calls for the overturning of Roe can be chosen by the president and backed by conservative senators for that reason. But it treats a nominee who says the same things in his testimony as unethical. (Is our nominated professor supposed to answer a question about whether he still agrees with his past writings? Doesn’t either answer to that question make the inconsistency worse?) It seems to me that no very strong case can be made that one of those scenarios threatens judicial impartiality and the other doesn’t. If you’re worried about judges’ pre-judging pending or impending (or theoretically, conceivably impending) cases, or “appearing” to do so, you’d have no necessarily greater reason for worry in the second case than in the first. The distinction is entirely the result of the code, and that’s an indictment of the code, not a reason to believe in the reasonableness of the distinction.