The feature of Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearing to which we’re most looking forward is the possibility that she will lash herself to the mast of the Constitution. She once did this while answering questions at a lecture at Notre Dame. The whole lecture is wonderful, but the best moment is when she warns against picking justices per personal politics and policy preferences. She favors justices who can resist those temptations.

“I use the example with my constitutional law students,” the future judge told her audience after the lecture “of Odysseus resisting the Sirens — that the Constitution is like when Odysseus ties himself to the mast to resist the song of Sirens. And he tells his crew, don’t untie me, no matter how much I plead. That’s what we’ve done as the American people with the Constitution.”

The Democrats hate it. It frightens them. They daren’t say that. It’s easier in this secular age simply to attack the judge’s religion. That’s what Senator Dianne Feinstein did in 2017, when ACB — as she’s fast becoming known — was put up as a rider of the 7th United States Appeals Circuit. The senator spoke of an “uncomfortable feeling” that “dogma and law are two different things.” And fretted: “the dogma lives loudly within you.”

“You are controversial because many of us that have lived our lives as women really recognize the value of finally being able to control our reproductive systems,” Mrs. Feinstein said, “And Roe entered into that obviously.” The senator was making a policy point when she rooted ACB’s controversialness in Roe v. Wade. Not even Justice Ginsburg, after all, thought Roe had been correctly based in the Constitution.

Roe grew out of, among other things, Griswold v. Connecticut, in which the Supreme Court struck down the Nutmeg State’s prohibition on the sale of birth control. It did so by finding a right to privacy in the “emanations” and “penumbra” of guarantees in the Bill of Rights. That is, the majority justices in Griswold squirmed out of the cords with which they’d been lashed to the Constitution and swooned to the sirens of policy.

The dissenters — Justices Hugo Black and Potter Stewart — marked this point. Justice Stewart called the law under which Estelle Griswold had been fined “uncommonly silly.” Justice Black wrote that he did not to “any extent whatever” base his dissent “on a belief that the law is wise, or that its policy is a good one.” He called the law “every bit as offensive” to him as to the majority.

Black, however, mocked the idea that the Constitution forbids the Congress from invading privacy and suggested it often does so. Stewart scorned the majority’s discovery of the right to birth control in, among other places, the Third Amendment, which prohibits in a time of peace the quartering soldiers in any house, absent the owner’s consent. “No soldier has been quartered in any house,” Stewart exclaimed.

That’s what it means to be lashed to the mast of the Constitution. That’s what it means to resist the siren songs of policy. And that’s of what the Democrats are afraid. Senator Feinstein made a career tarnishing mistake by going after Judge Barrett’s religion. Even President Trump’s arch foe, Mayor Bloomberg, published a piece, by one of his most distinguished columnists, calling Feinstein’s remarks an “outrage.”

What Mrs. Feinstein fears, as we see it, is the Constitution itself — and a Justice so faithful to the Constitution that she will lash herself to it and resist the siren of her own policy preferences and even her own religion. That’s the kind of justice who could change the country, by requiring the political branches wanting to change policy to do the hard work of politics rather than by packing the court with judges unlashed from the Constitution.

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Image: Drawing by Elliott Banfield, courtesy of the aritist.