Ketanji Brown Jackson and Antonin Scalia

Somewhere Justice Antonin Scalia must be singing, as he was known to do before he ascended. The great Scalia, who brought originalism to the fore before his death in 2016, might furrow his brow at the word “intent,” since his judicial philosophy was to examine the plain meaning of words, not to divine what James Madison was really thinking.

Yet Judge Jackson’s comment is a mark of Scalia’s influence. He once joked that originalism was viewed as a “weird affliction that seizes some people—’When did you first start eating human flesh?’” Now even Judge Jackson, whom President Biden expects to be a reliable liberal vote, wants to be seen as to believer

That doesn’t mean Mr. Biden will regret this nomination. “We’re all textualists now,” Justice Elena Kagan said in 2015, which hasn’t stopped her from flying with the Court’s left wing. Originalism doesn’t mean that even conservative Justices always agree. Other factors come in play, such as when to overrule a decaying precedent. A Justice who starts with the text can always finish with something else.

To that point, it’s no credit that Judge Jackson insists she has no judicial philosophy, merely a “methodology” with three steps: She says that she clears her mind of personal views, evaluates all the facts and arguments, and then applies the law. That’s a fine answer for a nominee to be a trial judge, but not for a Justice. If originalism is only one tool in Judge Jackson’s toolbox, she might also have a buzz saw in there.

In other hearing news, Judge Jackson said, appropriately, that she plans to recuse herself from the looming case on Harvard’s racial-preference policies, since she sits on the college’s board of overseers. But she refused to take a position on progressive calls to pack the Court. Would she be happy serving as one of 28 Justices? “If that’s Congress’s determination, yes,” she replied. “The Congress makes political decisions like that.”

We hope she changes her mind about the institutional interests of the Court if she’s confirmed. Precisely because it is a political decision, packing the Court is not a justiciable case that the Justices must refrain from prejudging. Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg both publicly opposed the idea, and it’s healthy to have that message sent by at least one Democratic appointee.

Republican Senators tried to portray Judge Jackson as soft on crime, in particular on sentences for child pornography offenders. The effort wasn’t persuasive, though the claim that Republicans were harder on the Judge than Democrats were on Brett Kavanaugh is ludicrous. Democrats demanded that Justice Kavanaugh withdraw his nomination based on uncorroborated claims that he was a sexual harasser and alcoholic.

Judge Jackson is likely to be confirmed as the 116th Justice of the Supreme Court. Although this wouldn’t change today’s 6-3 Court majority, the game is long, and two of the conservatives are in their 70s. It doesn’t take much imagination to see a Justice Jackson writing for a liberal Court within a decade, certainly two.

That’s a setback for conservative legal principles, but it’s the reality of a Senate run by Democrats. President Trump’s election-fraud self-indulgence cost the GOP two Georgia Senate seats, and the price of that defeat keeps going up.