Borking Machine gets an early tuneup.

Making Jeff Sessions out to be a clone of Gene Talmadge or Theodore Bilbo will be difficult. This is not the season for dead white males, particularly if they’re not dead yet, but Mr. Sessions can’t finesse the circumstances of his birth. He bears the names of both Thomas Jefferson, a Virginia slaveholder of no particular distinction, and P.G.T. Beauregard, the commander of the Confederate line at First Manassas who led the rout of the Union army.

Mr. Sessions received his name from his father, who settled “Beauregard” on him with the pride that a Muslim father might feel in settling the middle name “Hussein” on a son destined for big things in Washington. A reporter for the National Journal was bothered by his speech
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The president’s farewell toast to David Souter suggests that he’s not necessarily looking for a lawyer who understands the Constitution and the meaning of an oath to protect and defend that Constitution, but a nominee who knows all the words to “Kumbaya” and wants to give the world a Coke. “I will seek someone who understands that justice isn’t about abstract legal theory or a footnote in a casebook; it is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives, whether they can make a living and care for their families, whether they feel safe in their homes and welcome in their own nation. I view that quality of empathy … as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions.”

This is an odd job description from a man who once taught constitutional law, but there’s a considerable difference between the Constitution and constitutional law. The Constitution is a remarkable document, written by learned men in the plain language that the common man understands. The modern study of constitutional law is the work of lawyers trained to deconstruct plain language in search of things the authors of the Constitution never put there. Mr. Sessions and his colleagues have thankless work to do.

• Wesley Pruden