Wall Street Journal “Law Blog” writer Ashby Jones has an odd little post suggesting Judge Diane Wood may be “too risky a choice for Obama” for the Supreme Court. Oh, Jones pretends he's just reporting the views of others -- but since he never gets around to identifying the people by whom Woods “is often viewed as being the riskiest choice,” it's probably safe to say he's just dressing his own views up as the consensus.

And why is Woods “viewed by many as” described by Ashby as a “riskier” pick than some other potential nominees? Jones explains it's because Woods has supported abortion rights:

The reason she's viewed by many as a riskier pick than the others: she's been relatively outspoken in her support of abortion rights.

[Wall Street Journal reporter Nathan] Koppel writes that Judge Wood has expressed approval for the philosophy behind the Roe v. Wade decision establishing a woman's right to abortion, which was written by her former boss, Justice Harry Blackmun.

In 1993, Judge Wood praised Justice Blackmun, for whom she had clerked in the mid-1970s. “Justice Blackmun articulated in Roe ...the important insight that a core set of individual rights exists that neither the states nor the federal government may trample,” she wrote in the Dickinson Law Review. [Ellipsis in original]

Wait: That's supposed to be “risky”? Writing that “a core set of individual rights exists that neither the states nor the federal government may trample”? Does Jones expect a parade of conservative Republican Senators angrily insisting that the federal government should trample individual rights as often as possible?

Of course that won't happen -- conservatives have often “expressed approval for the philosophy” that there exist individual rights the government may trample (they just forget about that philosophy when it collides with their desire to trample on reproductive and marriage rights, among others.) What Jones tries to pass off as a likely conservative philosophical objection to Woods is really conservatives disagreeing with her about policy. They think abortion should be illegal.

That's their prerogative, of course, but if that's why they oppose a judicial nominee, reporters like Jones should make that clear rather than pretending it's some difference in judicial philosophy -- particularly when the philosophy they point to is one conservatives routinely pay lip service to.