The Right is excited and the Left is terrified about who succeeds Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And yet, as a historical matter, constitutional originalists should be very cautious in their expectations.

While the Republican Party purports to support limited government and the judges to do such limiting, the plain truth is that every single seat on the Supreme Court has been filled by a Republican president at some point in the last few decades. But rather than a 9-0 majority in favor of the Constitution’s original public meaning, we got President Dwight D. Eisenhower reflecting that he had only two regrets from being president and, unfortunately, they both sat on the Supreme Court. He wasn’t the only one with regrets.