That opposition would look ironic in hindsight, since once on the bench Souter spent a brief time voting with the conservatives, then cast one of the crucial votes to uphold Roe, then swiftly evolved into as reliable a liberal as Bill Clinton or Barack Obama could have ever hoped to appoint … and then, as the by-then-inevitable coup de grâce, retired under Obama, allowing Sonia Sotomayor to take his place. For Republicans and conservatives, it was the most extraordinary of own goals — as if Obama had been persuaded by, say, Ben Nelson or Joe Lieberman to appoint a jurist who turned out to vote like Samuel Alito.

Now imagine a counterfactual without this epic blunder. Had Souter simply voted like a typical Republican appointee — not in lock step with Antonin Scalia, but as an institutionalist, incrementalist conservative, in line with the current chief justice, John Roberts — then it’s likely that Roe v. Wade would have been mostly overturned in the 1990s, returning much of abortion law to the states, and that the gay rights movement would have subsequently advanced through referendums and legislation rather than a sweeping constitutionalization of cultural debate.

This, in turn, would have dramatically lowered the stakes of judicial politics for many Republican voters, making an untimely event like Scalia’s death less of a crisis moment, a response like the Garland pocket veto less of a necessity and the candidacy of Donald Trump something more easily rejected.

Indeed, I strongly suspect that in a world without the Souter own goal — a world where the Supreme Court had sided with cultural conservatives to the extent one would have expected given the number of recent Republican appointees — a nominee like Merrick Garland could still have been confirmed with Republican votes, and the filibuster could still persist, reserved for the unqualified, corrupt and genuinely extreme. Oh, and into the bargain, Donald Trump might well not be president.

Of course this is just a suspicion, and counterfactuals don’t really work that easily; you can’t change one thing and hold everything else constant. Moreover even if you could, few liberals would trade the kind of big Supreme Court losses on social issues (and not only on social issues, of course) that I’m imagining for more comity in the nomination process and a slightly lower risk of a demagogue capturing the White House. If your foes score an own goal, you don’t hand the point back to them; you welcome the edge and keep on playing, no matter how much they whine about what could have been or make dangerous plays to win the lost point back.

But a liberal can be glad that Bush nominated Souter, glad that he effectively betrayed the party that put him on the court, and still recognize the peculiar impact of that nomination. The gears of history grind, the tectonic plates shift — but individuals and contingencies still matter, and in their desire for a smooth and bipartisan nominating process almost 27 years ago it was Warren Rudman and John Sununu who helped transform it into a ruthless and purely partisan affair.