Here’s my latest column from The Post. It (mostly) defends Sen. Schumer’s position on how much questioning Supreme Court nominees ought to be subjected to:

Republicans can’t have it both ways. Either judges are fallible human beings, prone to substituting their own biases for sound constitutional reasoning at the clack of a gavel, or they’re cool-blooded automatons, applying the Constitution to specific cases in a way not dissimilar to old punch-card computers.

If they’re computers, a check of the specs should do just fine for vetting a nominee to the Supreme Court like Judge John Roberts (Harvard, check; appearances before the Supreme Court, check).

But if they’re human beings — as President Bush and many in his party have made clear when criticizing “activist judges” and a runaway judiciary over the years — then it matters quite a bit what a nominee actually thinks.

About Roberts, so far the American people have been told . . . not much.

Judge Roberts, it seems, has no opinions. He’s just a resume with a goofy grin.

And many in the Republican Party would like to keep it that way. They’ve spent years arguing — regarding Bush’s lower-court nominations — that the Senate’s confirmation process should be based almost solely on a nominee’s credentials, not on such nasty business as “ideology” or “litmus tests.”

But New York’s own Sen. Chuck Schumer has another approach in mind: Fire up the grill.

The piece goes on to lay out some of Schumer’s case and why I particularly think he has a case as regards blank-slate Roberts.