We don’t even have a nominee yet, but the posturing — academic and political — is shaping up, as signaled on the editorial page of today’s Washington Post.

In the right corner, weighing in with the mantra of “commitment to the text of the Constitution and the vision of the Founding Fathers,” is senator Jeff Sessions from Alabama, ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee.

In the left corner, weighing in with the historical untenability of ascribing to the Founders any unified “original intent,” is Joseph J. Ellis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning professor of history at Mount Holyoke College.

Ellis is would win the match on points, but Sessions has a knockout punch: by and large, Americans agree with him, whether or not original intent is tenable historically.

It is perhaps probably significant that neither one speaks of abortion, the issue that, whether explicitly or encoded, has dominated confirmation hearings for decades. The current hot button issues for Sessions are political speech, guns, and eminent domain.