Let me confess up front: I’m a judge fan.

If you’re folowing the Alito hearings, by now you probably know almost exactly as much about Samuel Alito as those who’ve been ignoring the hearings entirely.

It’s not your fault. And if you’re a great judge of character, you might now “know his heart.” Sort of the way our President tends to know peoples’ hearts. Which tells you nothing about how he’ll behave as a justice.

Politicians can’t talk to judges. Their communication styles are too different. It amazes me that they can even breathe the same air.

It’s tricky. If you ask a politician how he feels about abortion, he might say, “It’s a tragedy. But issues of personal freedom are important, and the right to privacy as expressed in Roe v. Wade ought to be respected.” When a politician says this, he means, “I’m pro-choice. Abortion oughta be legal.”

So here comes the problem. If you ask a judge how he feels about abortion, he might say, “It’s a tragedy. But issues of personal freedom are important, and the right to privacy as expressed in Roe v. Wade ought to be respected.”

When a judge says this, he means something like, “It’s a tragedy. But issues of personal freedom are important, and the right to privacy as expressed in Roe v. Wade ought to be respected.”

Am I saying that judges are more honest than politicians? No, no, not at all - well, okay, of course I am. At least they’re more forthright. Politicians aren’t generally complex people - they’re simple people who use complex language. But at bottom, many politicians’ motives are somewhat cavemanesque (”Wanna kill taxes. Wanna kill bad guys. Wanna clear brush.”).

Judges operate differently. Most of them aren’t sure what politicians mean, for instance, by the term “activist judges” (for my judicial friends: It means, “guys who make decisions I disagree with”), or “legislating from the bench” (”making decisions I disagree with”). Politicians think that if a judge really wants to change something in our country, he overturns the relevant thingie and then comes up with a neat term paper that justifies what he was trying to do. The idea that a judge’s written decision actually reflects what a judge was really thinking about and how he arrived at his ruling… well, tell a politician that and he’ll hear something very different. He might hear, “Nice tie!” Or he might hear a small brass band playing “Camptown Races.” But that’s about it.

It’s possible that in Samuel Alito the conservative movement has found a reliably right-of-center ideologue who will rule again and again on the side of the guy who nominated him. It’s also possible that he’s a judicial conservative, and that he’ll be genuinely conservative about “legislating from the bench,” and that this will mean, for instance, protecting a decades-old and oft-reaffirmed judicial precedent like… Roe v. Wade.

The idea that at this point overturning Roe v. Wade (for example, always for example) would require judicial liberalism and activism isn’t one that makes a lot of sense to legislators or executives. But it’s true. Tell a politician this and he’ll hear something like, “We’re ordering from the Greek place for lunch. Do you want the souvlaki?”

So maybe Samuel Alito will be instrumental in overturning (oh, for instance, off the top of my head…) Roe v. Wade. And maybe he won’t. Either one is possible. The only thing I’m sure of is that the politicians and political strategists think they know. And they don’t. That’s somewhat comforting. And by that I mean, “That’s somewhat comforting.”