Brent Kendall had a piece in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal, Trump Appointees Poised to Influence Legal Outcomes for Decades to Come, that explored this item. It’s well worth the read.

One statement in particular caught my eye, though.

Republican and Democratic [judicial] appointees often embrace differing legal philosophies that lead to divergent results.

This is at the core of the problem. As our Constitution’s Article I, Section 1 makes clear, there is only one legitimate legal philosophy for judges and Justices. They’re sworn to uphold the Constitution, not some mythical document that better comports with what they want to uphold.

Thus, they must apply the Constitution and the statute(s) before them as they’re written, not as they wish they were written; not as “adjusted” to fit a judge’s personal view of what society needs, as articulated by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and acted out by Chief Justice John Roberts; not Thurgood Marshall’s you do what you think is right and let the law catch up.

All of those…philosophies…are political decisions well outside the ken of the judiciary and solely within the scope of the political branches of government and of We the People, who hire and fire those political personages.