Going to hell, or whatever.

President Bush should have ended his prepared comments on his nomination of Judge Samuel Alito with "Release the hounds!" Within minutes of the nomination, packs of our best and brightest legal minds were loosed upon the plains of the Internet, felling liberal wildebeests right and left.

While some doe-eyed news anchoresses were fretting about Alito's "anti-abortion" stance, our side was posting detailed memoranda on why the liberal herd was wrong. Julian Sanchez at Reason magazine's website sank his teeth into the talking points distributed by leading liberal activist groups. NRO's own brilliant legal blogger Ed Whelan spent the morning sucking the marrow out of the bones of one argument after another.

By 10:25 in the morning Whelan was already explaining that one "abortion case" that had occasioned criticism of Alito wasn't really about abortion at all. "The threshold question of administrative law that divided the majority and the dissent" wasn't the sanctity of life, but rather "the question whether principles of so-called Chevron deference applied to the HHS action or whether instead so-called Skidmore deference applied."

And here I thought "Chevron deference" meant going there even if the gas was cheaper at Citgo.

The first question you should ask of anyone who insists that Alito (or Roberts or Scalia or Thomas) is a rabid ideologue bent on destroying liberty and joy is a simple one: Do you believe something can be wrong and constitutional at the same time? Or do you think that something can be right and unconstitutional?

This is the fundamental question separating the "left" and "right" on judges. Indeed, Whelan's heavy lifting on the details is a demonstration of that. Conservatives, God love 'em, actually think the Constitution means something, which is a nice way of saying it doesn't mean everything.

This is a point of deep confusion on the left. If you wade through the talking points generated against Alito by the various interest groups, this confusion leaps from the page. Alito upheld the constitutionality of spousal-consent requirements for women seeking abortion. Bam! "Alito would overturn Roe v. Wade"! Alito ruled that the Family and Medical Leave Act had not breached states' sovereign immunity under the Eleventh Amendment. Therefore, according to the Daily Kos blog, "for Alito, workers shouldn't be able to take 12 weeks of unpaid leave to take care of newborns or loved ones." A case involving whether the police had a suitable warrant to strip-search a woman and her daughter is translated by Kos into "Not only [are] strip searches of 10-year-old girls okay, but of wives as well since they are all merely that man's chattel."

This is the same argument the Left has used for decades. We were told that John Roberts's decision upholding the constitutionality of the District of Columbia's policy of zero tolerance of eating on the subway proved that he actually favored a policy of having young girls handcuffed and booked for eating a French fry. Ted Kennedy's evil diatribe against "Robert Bork's America" was among the most anti-intellectual, demagogic displays in American political history.

Is it really so hard to grasp that one can believe that allowing people to take time off from work to deal with family emergencies is a great and good thing, but that maybe, just maybe, the Constitution doesn't obviously let Congress authorize state-government employees to sue for that benefit in federal courts? In a nation of laws, reasons matter. If the Supreme Court had ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that "separate but equal" was unconstitutional because ducks go quack and vests have no sleeves, it would possible to applaud the result even as you condemned the reasoning behind it, right?

One is tempted to note that the heroic justice of the Progressive era, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., was deified by liberals for emphasizing just this point about the role of judges. "I always say, as you know, that if my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them," he declared. "It's my job."

But the proponents of a living constitution don't want to get bogged down arguing about the meaning of the Constitution; they want to argue about right and wrong. And a good constitution is one that always upholds what is right and never countenances what is wrong. This is why liberal justices are now fishing for precedents in foreign countries, because they can't find what they need in actual precedent or text.

These justices are lawyering themselves right out of a job. Because if the Supreme Court is there to decide what's right and wrong rather than what's constitutional or unconstitutional, then we don't need lawyers on the bench at all. Surely if the questions before the Court concern what's good and what's bad, there are people--priests, rabbis, truck drivers, etc.--more qualified to decide such things than a bunch of lawyers.