For Senate Republicans who crusade against activist judges, a moment of truth is approaching.

It will happen when the Senate decides whether to give a seat on the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals to Lawrence VanDyke, a former solicitor general in Nevada and Montana.

In his career in public service, VanDyke has been about as activist as they come — on the far-right side. Any Republican who would vote for his confirmation after railing about moderate or progressive “activist” judges will reveal himself or herself as an abject hypocrite who would sacrifice judicial fairness in the name of conservative party ideology.

In both Montana and Nevada, where VanDyke served in 2013-14 and from 2015-18, respectively, he aggressively looked for cases in other states where he could advance his ideological views on such divisive issues as abortion, gun regulation and same-sex marriage.

As shown in emails unearthed by news reporters in Montana, VanDyke was so gung-ho about joining Montana into one politically charged case that he committed to it without even bothering to review the legal document at issue. The case involved a long-disputed cross displayed on municipal property at the Mount Soledad veterans memorial in San Diego.

Emails from Montana also showed that VanDyke worked hand-in-hand with the Federalist Society, the hugely powerful conservative legal organization, which VanDyke asked for help while “having trouble coming up with any plausible (much less good) arguments” in a gun case.

In Hobby Lobby’s high-profile case arguing for an exemption to an Obamacare rule for companies to help pay for employees’ birth control, VanDyke notified his colleagues that Alabama’s attorney general had altered a sign-on letter to better correspond with the public relations strategy of two conservative organizations — the Beckett Fund and the Alliance Defending Freedom.

Then there was an email to an assistant solicitor general in Alabama regarding an amicus brief on New York’s ban on semiautomatic weapons, in which VanDyke clearly demonstrated his personal views on the matter by included an image of himself hunting with semiautomatic rifle.

“Plus semi-auto firearms are fun to hunt elk with, as the attached picture attests,” he wrote. “That’s a SCAR 17 — the same gun used by the Navy Seals (but mine’s only semi-auto, unfortunately).”

VanDyke didn’t change his stripes a bit in Nevada, where he was part of far-right Attorney General Adam Laxalt’s staff. That team added Nevada into amicus briefs on several conservative issues — abortion and immigration restrictions among them — which were well out of step with the will of the people in our increasingly progressive state.

When questioned about whether he applies his personal ideology in his work, VanDyke gives a version of this comment he made to the Billings Gazette in 2014: “I didn’t get to choose what I worked on,” he said. “If people want to draw inferences from what I worked on, as to my own personal views, that would be erroneous.”

Wrong. Based on his record and what we’ve seen of his correspondence, it would be a perfectly logical conclusion.

Montana voters certainly decided as much in 2014, when VanDyke sought to unseat a longtime state Supreme Court justice. The electorate sent VanDyke packing with barely 40% of the vote after seeing right through his campaign slogan, “Law, Not Politics.” No doubt, voters noticed that VanDyke drew an avalanche of campaign funds from outside conservative organizations.

“He is a darling of the Republican right wing, hired, it seems, exclusively because he wants to use his position to fight the federal government,” one Montana columnist wrote.

The confirmation vote for VanDyke, now a deputy assistant attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice, is expected this week.

Senators should take a cue from Montana voters and give VanDyke a thumbs-down.

The courts need jurists whose decisions are based on the law, not on political or religious ideology.

For those who don’t like judicial activists, VanDyke is not their man. He is a political activist looking for the votes of hypocrites.