I stopped to shiver at the thought of 9 Alitos on the bench, but then the thought occurred to me that the current makeup of the court’s conservative majority is a perfect mirror of the American right-wing coalition:

• A chauvinistic sex-pest drunkard whose main guiding interest is keeping the party going for his rich fraternity bros
• A brainwashed cult acolyte
• A corrupt government official on the take (who’s also a sex pest)
• A faux-intellectual who only ever makes bad-faith arguments that support his existing prejudices
• The picture you see in the encyclopedia next to the entry about MLK’s “white moderate” letter
• A schemer who pretends to be right down the middle of the road but is moving levers behind the scenes to enable the machinations of the others