BUSH NOMINATES conservative to Supreme Court. As a headline it ought to be up there with “Bears Choosing Woods for Lavatory Purposes” and “Pope Still Catholic” for its newsworthiness. But apparently it’s an outrage. It’s a sign of crisis and depravity at the White House. A desperate sop to the dark forces of the extreme Right.

Judge Samuel Alito was nominated by President George W. Bush on Monday to fill the vacancy on the court left by the retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor. If you believe the news reports, Judge Alito (his name is almost an anagram of Attila — how spooky is that?) is a machinegun-loving, women-hating, Bible-toting fundamentalist. Democrats are vowing to oppose him.

Last time I looked, Mr Bush was elected President last year. Under the Constitution, that gives him the authority to nominate justices to the Supreme Court, pending confirmation by the Senate. Presidents have duly appointed judges in the past who are believed to share their judicial philosophy.

Bill Clinton appointed two justices who have routinely voted to uphold abortion, affirmative action, the rigid separation of Church and State. Both were approved with almost unanimous — including Republican — support. Unless the nominee is a fool, a crook, or someone whose views are so extreme that he would undermine the freedoms on which American society is built, precedent says the judge should be confirmed.

Nobody has suggested Judge Alito is a fool or a crook. So he must be a dangerous extremist?

The source of most of the outrage on the Left and in much of the media is a famous case in 1991, in which, in a dissent from his two colleagues, the judge said it was all right for a legislature to pass a law that required a woman to notify her husband — “notify”, mind you, not “seek the permission of” — before she had an abortion. In dissenting, Judge Alito explicitly said he was not passing judgment on whether it was a good piece of legislation. For all we know, he may think it was a perfectly stupid idea. But, as he said, the issue for the court was whether the law actually violated the Constitution.

He has adopted this hands-off approach in other cases. His consistent philosophical line is that judges ought to interpret the laws, not make them. It’s an unfashionable view these days, but it has the appealing virtue of being right.