Mirengoff’s article is worth a read, and raises considerations that conservatives should keep in mind. But it strikes me that his argument, at a point that I took to be crucial, is open to serious objection. He writes that “the politics of the confirmation process tell us that a standard under which conservative senators vote against nominees in, say, the Sandra Day O’Connor mold, is a standard that might well lead non-conservative senators (that is to say a majority) to vote against the next Antonin Scalia.”

If, that is, conservatives vote against a nominee because they believe her legal philosophy to be seriously defective, they will make it more likely that senators who consider conservative legal philosophies seriously defective will vote against nominees who hold them. Yet most non-conservative senators are already open to the possibility of casting such votes, without needing any spur from conservatives to do so. They already did it to Bork; half of the Democrats did it to Roberts, too, and the other half hardly repudiated the idea of casting votes against particular legal philosophies.

“Another Antonin Scalia” would occasion a fight. It seems unlikely that it would be a much harder fight if conservatives rejected a non-conservative nominee. To put it another way: It isn’t obvious that conservatives gained anything by way of fair consideration for our nominees by letting Ginsburg and Breyer through without a fight.