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GAZETTE: What are his strengths and weaknesses both legally and politically?

TRIBE: I can’t identify any legal weaknesses although, being human, he must have some. For his own part, Merrick Garland is much too humble to feel comfortable suggesting that he is without flaws. As for his strengths and weaknesses politically, all I can say is that I think Garland is about as apolitical as any judge can be, although he certainly isn’t so naïve as to believe that law and politics in the broadest and highest sense occupy two entirely separate spheres. It is the height of irony that senators who know full well that nobody in the nation is better qualified to sit on our nation’s highest court than Judge Garland — and that his entire life is a testament to fairness and decency — should threaten to treat him, and the president who nominated him after exhaustive consideration and consultation, so shabbily as to slam the doors of the Senate in his face and in the face of a president who still has the greater part of a year to serve in the term to which he was elected in 2012.

In that sense, the president’s choice represented both a decision to transcend politics and a political masterstroke. Any selection that might have smacked of identity politics would have been vulnerable on that ground, while a selection so evidently made on the basis of sheer excellence — the basis that the president announced when he made this choice — is as likely as any selection could possibly be to undermine whatever public support might otherwise exist for the Senate’s stubborn refusal to accord the nominee a fair and timely hearing and a floor vote.