The Federalist Society congratulates itself at Union Station, and torture fan Fat Tony has the quote of the day. WaPo teabags them with A03 placement**:

Federalists Relish Well-Placed Friends

Funny, if they were so important, you'd think that Justice Roberts wouldn't have "forgotten" he was a member during his confirmation hearings. But let that pass. Fat Tony's quote:

Scalia said courts and law schools embrace the alternate view of a "living Constitution" and so too does the ordinary citizen, "who has come to believe that what he violently abhors must be unconstitutional."

"It is no easy task to wean the public, the professoriate and (especially) the judiciary away from such a seductive and judge-empowering philosophy," he said.

"Seductive and judge-empowering philosophy"?!

You mean like the kind of philosophy that allows judges to select a President with a "good for one time only" case like Bush v. Gore?

Cass Sunstein does some conservative framing on the Bush Court in WaPo today:

The most intriguing development on the Supreme Court this term has been the emergence of a powerful alliance between two different kinds of conservatives: the visionaries and the minimalists.

Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, the visionaries, are not merely predictable in their votes; their sweeping opinions call for fundamental changes in constitutional law. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, the minimalists, have also turned out to be predictable in their votes. But their opinions tend to be cautious, narrow and unambitious. They are reluctant to reject the court's own precedents, and attempt to rule in a way that preserves them.

In every one of the term's key cases, including today's momentous decision on school-desegregation plans, the minimalists and the visionaries have agreed on the outcome -- but they have frequently divided on the reasoning.

Er, I've got minor editorial suggestion for Professor Sunstein, and that's that he use change "visionaries" to another word:

The votes, silly. Yet another split decision from the Bush Court.