SICK BURN: Ann Althouse takes apart Jeffrey Toobin and, in the process, Ruth Bader Ginsburg:

Toobin calls that a “civics lecture”? I think what he means is that the demand for a text is so basic that to talk about it is to sound as though we are back in high school, and that’s either an insult to the old folks on the Court who should be presumed to already know such things or it’s an implicit criticism of them for failing to live up to the standards that of course Gorsuch knows they know.

Here’s the transcript of the oral argument, where you can see that Gorsuch followed the “civics lecture” with one more question: “Aren’t those all textual indications in the Constitution itself that maybe we ought to be cautious about stepping in here?” Gorsuch was suggesting that the particularity of the constitutional text about voting rights with respect to race, sex, and age — in the Fifteenth, and Nineteenth, and Twenty-sixth Amendments — means that a more particular text is needed to find a right to be free from political gerrymandering. . . .

And Gorsuch wasn’t silenced: He was the next Justice to ask a question. But speaking of feeling as though you’re back in high school, Toobin sounds like a schoolboy muttering “oh, burn.”

And yet, Ginsburg, like Gorsuch, only asked a question. It’s a question that resonates with the old Edwin Meese distinction: She doesn’t need to go back to the constitutional text because she’s already moved on to constitutional law. “One person, one vote” isn’t in the Constitution. It’s judge-written text from old cases, so if Gorsuch wants to know the connection to the text, he can just consult the old cases and stop wasting the adults’ time. . . .

Toobin is so dismissive of the idea of going back to the constitutional text that he didn’t even bother to check to see if Reynolds v. Sims and Baker v. Carr were based on “the First and Fourteenth Amendments.” But neither of those cases even mentions the First Amendment.* Those cases are based on the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Period.

Read the whole thing, which makes plain that you’re better off reading Althouse’s blog than the New Yorker.