Matt Zeitlin

When Roberts and Alito were appointed, liberals were plenty upset, but they never went after their qualifications or intelligence.

This was especially strange with Alito. As Orin Kerr pointed out, Alito and Sotomayor are oddly similar:

her resume hints at someone who is sort of like a liberal mirror image of Samuel Alito: the humble kid who goes to Princeton and Yale Law, becomes a prosecutor, and then gets appointed at a young age to the federal bench and puts in 15 years as a respected (if not particularly high profile) federal judge.

But no one would ever dare argue that Alito wasn’t qualified or intelligent enough or was a pure identity politics/political pick. And while Alito, being yet another white, Catholic male, doesn’t seem like an identity pick, he was in a strange way. That’s because for conservatives, appointing conservative Catholics is a way of communicating to the base, especially those who care about social issues, that the appointee is one of us and isn’t likely to be too friendly to abortion rights. But since this type of dogwhistling/identity politics is invisible to the mainstream press, no one ever really talks about it, and picks like Alito’s are seen as totally normative.