In the New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin asks whether John McCain will prove a "maverick" when it comes to Supreme Court appointments. The answer? Nope. Toobin finds that McCain's rhetoric on judges ranges from the retrograde to reductive to simply wrong. My personal favorite is when McCain, who's not a lawyer and presumably has neither the time nor the training to be absorbing Supreme Court decisions in his spare time, condemns the "airy constructs the Court has employed over the years as poor substitutes for clear and rigorous constitutional reasoning.” Toobin doesn't quite say this, but this isn't a case of deep and abiding principle overwhelming an otherwise even-tempered individual. No one has ever detected a deep fealty to a conservative judicial philosophy in McCain. Quite the opposite. McCain does not actually appear to care very much about judicial nominations, and so finds the issue a convenient place to pander to the right.
