Ron Johnson is an embarrassment to Wisconsin

Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, who admitted to only having read the U.S. Constitution three or four times and finding it difficult to understand, suddenly purports to expertise on federal judicial qualifications and is unilaterally blocking, on no stated grounds whatsoever, the nomination of Victoria Nourse, a highly regarded scholar and practitioner, to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

It might be different if someone who knew what they were talking about was opposed to Prof. Nourse's nomination, but it's Ron Johnson.

A letter from some folks who do know what they're talking about:

Dear Chairman Leahy & Ranking Member Grassley ...*

Among its 53 signatories: Professors Janine P. Geske, Michael M. O'Hear, Chad Oldfather, and Peter K. Rofes, Marquette University School of Law; Professor Akhil Amar, Yale Law School, a constitutional scholar of the highest rank; and, perhaps most notably, Professor Randy Barnett, Georgetown University Law Center, who has been the most dedicated and prolific libertarian opponent of what Ron Johnson calls "Obamacare," which the Senator himself describes as the single biggest assault on Ron Johnson's personal freedom in Ron Johnson's lifetime.

Over and over and over again. In fact it was tedious a year ago.

However, Johnson is likely immune to irony as well, as Barnett has made Johnson's case considerably more forcefully than Johnson is capable of.

Ron Johnson remarked that he found the very notion of the president's powers to nominate and appoint judges "depressing," so it's clear that Johnson's blue slip is motivated by nothing except the cheapest of cheap partisanship, or precisely what the Constitution was designed to avoid.

He should be ashamed.

* Pleased to see Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III got demoted. Hopefully Sen. Grassley is more capable of reason and less of idiocy.