I forgot to mention that one of the many objections to Thomas being put forth as an appointee, was the question about how good a legal mind he was, but that wasn't due to his lack of education and training as a legal scholar. Those criticisms were of his short tenure on the Court of Appeals (around a year or so), in addition to the complete lack of distinguished legal writing. This resulted in the American Bar Association's judicial evaluation committee (which vets all judicial appointments) giving Thomas the tepid rating of "qualified" rather than "well qualified".

Scalia also served on the Court of Appeals for Washington DC. Anyone notice a pattern? This is where the conservatives first began to make the appointments that made the inroads into them getting really conservative decisions on cases that could be brought in DC courts. Some of you might remember that this was an issue for the DC sniper cases, and where the prosecutors wanted the trials to be held. The DC court is much more conservative than the courts in the areas surrounding DC, where the snipers first started the shootings.

That was a very calculated political strategy in judicial appointments begun long ago in the Nixon era. Scalia was originally a judicial assassin for the Nixon administration.