Ramesh, there is a world of difference between voting on someone else’s nominees and nominating one’s own. That aside, there is also a significant difference between 2001 (i.e., pre-McConnell), or even 2004-05, and now.

Sen. McCain has long been planning a run for the presidency in 2008. Had he opposed Roberts or Alito, that would have severely wounded his chances to get the nomination. Moreover, as long as McConnell was the law, there was reason for McCain to hope that Roberts or Alito would, however reluctantly, rely on it to uphold McCain/Feingold. You’re quite right to say their vote against upholding it was not a shock. Still, it strains credulity to believe that Senator McCain — who did not have to involve himself personally in the Wisconsin Right to Life litigation — would have gone to the trouble of filing briefs in the case if he hadn’t thought he had a chance to persuade one of them to go his way.

McCain is very vested in campaign finance reform. He went through years of effort to get it passed and to defend it (and seek to expand it) in the courts. The Supreme Court could now go either way on it — one more liberal justice could save and perhaps strengthen it; another conservative justice might well send it to history’s dustbin. Further, given that the high court has invited more cases, appointments to the lower courts become very important: the way lower court judges adjudicate those cases will profoundly affect what they look like when they get to the Supreme Court. I just find it very hard to believe, given all his work on this issue, that we should conclude campaign-finance wouldn’t weigh very heavily on a President McCain’s judicial selections.

Finally, if it is futile to look for clues of a systematic McCain judicial philosophy, I am puzzled why the editors would suggest that he “identif[y] respected conservative legal figures to whom he will turn when nominating judges.” Isn’t the point of identifying systematic conservative thinkers as advisers an effort to signal to voters that McCain will implement a conservative judicial philosophy? If the truth of the matter is that McCain doesn’t think about issues in a systematic way, isn’t that something we want readers to see clearly rather than help the candidate obscure?