Thanks, Andy. The next time someone asks me if I’m a McCarthyite, I’ll say, Yes, if you mean Andy.

First, just to underscore how narrow the disagreements here have been: If in the next few weeks or months the Senate Republicans should actually go ahead and change the Senate rules to restrict the filibuster of judges, I imagine I will be with the rest of my interlocutors here in defending the Republicans against the many critics we are sure to hear from. I would say in that circumstance that the Republicans were within their rights to change the rules with 51 votes and did no violence thereby to the Constitution.

On the question of ideology, I think that it would be difficult to simply derive standards for rejecting judicial nominees on the basis of first principles. Maybe we could some day have a judiciary so altogether pleasing in every other way that senators would be debating whether a nominee had the right view of legislative history. All I would say is that a senator should consider, first, whether his own view of the judicial function is sound and, second, how far a particular nominee departs from that sound view. But practical political judgment would inevitably be necessary to determine how far would be “too far.”