“Roberts would have been a fine candidate for a Senate in Democratic hands. But now we have 55 Republican seats in the Senate and the vice president to cast a deciding vote — and Son of Read-My-Lips gives us another ideological blind date,” writes Ann. There’s a case that conservatives would have been better off with a knock-down, drag-out ideological fight for the first vacancy under Bush; I’m not going to deny that the lady has a point. I would simply reiterate a point I’ve made before: Any nominee would to some extent be a stealth nominee. We have some reason to think that Mike Luttig or Michael McConnell would vote to overrule Roe, for example, if they were on the Court. But we don’t know it for a fact; they haven’t said that they would; they surely would not say it if they were before the Senate; and they have said nothing to preclude the possibility of sticking with it as a precedent. We would be taking a leap in the dark to some extent with anyone.