Common knowledge: Supreme Court confirmation hearings are now conducted on a kindergarten level. The dominant theme is that some judges follow the law, while other judges are "political." And of course the nominee issues an endless stream of vacuous banalities assuring the country that he or she is one of the former. But at the level of the Supreme Court, this is an essentially meaningless distinction. Cases generally get to the Supreme Court precisely because reasonable people can disagree about what the law requires in a given case, and in political salient cases the resolution of such indeterminacy is likely to fall along political lines.