By Jacquielynn Floyd

The Dallas Morning News

Confession: I felt relief this week at the president’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court.

This isn’t because I agree with Gorsuch on many — perhaps any — hot-button issues: reproductive rights, environmental regulation, health care and other topics of ideological warfare in our bifurcated society. A widely circulated SCOTUS graphic that places Gorsuch’s patrician head a little ways right of that of the late Antonin Scalia, whom he proposes to replace, makes that plain.

But I was deeply relieved to note that Gorsuch, an able and experienced jurist, is clearly qualified to function normally as a member of the court. He possesses the mental equipment necessary to serve as a justice, even if his presence tilts the panel further to the right.

This is no small deal, taking into account some of the actions that have emerged from the hyperactive mouth, pen and Twitter account our new president during his first two weeks (two weeks!) in office. Considering that the nominee could have been a moose, a cabbage or a bowl of screws, defended by a chorus of straight-faced White House grandees as an “alternative person,” Gorsuch represents an unprecedented high point in executive wisdom from the current administration.

So I inclined, albeit reluctantly, toward what I informally call the “Katyal position,” which articulates this perspective. Neal Katyal, a Georgetown law professor and former acting solicitor general, argued in an op-ed piece published Wednesday by the New York Times that if confirmed, “Gorsuch would help to restore confidence in the rule of law.”

The person making this observation isn’t just some guy, some talking-head hack from a previous administration: Katyal has progressive bona fides: He has argued for Guantanamo detainees, for the Affordable Care Act; he served as co-counsel for Al Gore in Gore vs. Bush in 2000.

He was the first Justice Department official to admit publicly that the agency committed an ethical lapse when it argued in favor of interning Japanese-American citizens during World War II. Perhaps not incidentally, he is also the son of Indian immigrants (the point is taken, though, that some progressives are questioning Katyal for his failure to mention in the op-ed that he now represents corporate clients who could have cases decided by the high court).

But his message is pretty straightforward: Gorsuch is a deeply conservative pick, but not a crazy one. It’s not quite like — oh, I don’t know — putting a rich and clueless shill for private schools in charge of public education, or installing a scorched-earth chaos-spinning nationalist warlock as the top adviser in the executive office.

Yes, it is hard to sit down and patiently examine this argument amid the chaos and hypocrisy this confirmation process brings up. Senate Republicans, as every schoolchild knows, resorted to unprecedented obstructionism last year in flatly refusing to consider Obama nominee Merrick B. Garland for the court vacancy.

Why? Because they could. Garland, a revered jurist who was viewed as a supremely qualified moderate — Katyal calls him “perhaps the most qualified nominee ever for the high court” — was the nominee of an incumbent Democratic president. Republican lawmakers were determined to trample tradition in the interests of ideology.

There’s no fig leaf for such naked placement of political self-interest above national welfare. Legislators didn’t even bother to pretend there was.

So now Senate Democrats have a choice: Go along, or get even? The D’s don’t have an awful lot of heft these days, but they have the numbers to delay or even derail this nomination. If Democrats act uniformly to poke a stick in the eye of the Republican leadership, isn’t it a classic case of payback?

It certainly is. You need not be nuanced reader of political fallout to note that Republicans have paid pretty much zero price for consigning the Merrick nomination to perpetual limbo. They have it coming, whispers an angry, vengeful little demon perching on my shoulder. Let them have a bitter jolt of their own noxious medicine.

That’s the other argument, the “no quarter” combat cry, in a Kevlar nutshell: Fight and protest, protest and fight. Anything less means cratering to crazy, giving in before misrule and blunt bullying force. It’s tempting.

Yet Katyal persuaded me — just barely — with this:

“I, for one, wish it were a Democrat choosing the next justice,” he wrote. “But since that is not to be, one basic criterion should be paramount: Is the nominee someone who will stand up for the rule of law and say no to a president or Congress that strays beyond the Constitution and laws?”

Gorsuch, Katyal says, has proved himself committed to judicial independence and has pointedly written that judges must be above the policy whims of political administrations.

Right now, nothing could be more important. Nothing.

Yes, there is a lot at stake. And yes, the views Gorsuch has expressed have not been a lot of people’s political cup-o’-tea. Senate Democrats should question him closely and thoroughly about those views.

But I hope they’ll also keep in mind that right now, an unyielding commitment to judicial independence — and against executive interference — may turn out to be the most important qualification a SCOTUS nominee can have.

Jacquielynn Floyd is a columnist for the Dallas Morning News. Readers may email her at jfloyd@dallasnews.com.