As the Senate hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson unfold, we should find increasingly troubling Jackson’s tendency toward rank sophistry.

While it is indeed a judge’s job to parse words carefully, there’s a difference between humbly parsing words to figure out their meaning and willfully doing so to manipulate their meaning beyond ordinary limits. Jackson has done the latter, sometimes so far beyond plausibility as to go past faulty discernment into the realm of bad faith.