Coming late in the show’s fifth season, one of the most memorable episodes of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing finds the Bartlet administration making two appointments to the Supreme Court. Faced with the sudden death of one of the body’s conservative justices (and a Republican majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee) President Josiah Bartlet’s staff meets with a variety of potential candidates, including the very liberal Evelyn Baker Lang (portrayed by Glenn Close) and the ultraconservative Christopher Mulready (William Fichtner).

High jinks ensue, and the administration ultimately decides to abandon the rather boring idea of appointing two centrists in favor of Mulready and Baker Lang — mainly because senior staff find their high-minded squabbling about legal matters entertaining. “I hate him, but he’s brilliant,” declares Bartlet communications director Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff). “And the two of them together are fighting like cats and dogs . . . but it works.”

The whole scenario is, of course, as improbable as it is ridiculous. And, as was typical of the show, it also projected an assortment of bad and self-defeating liberal impulses: uncritical deference to credentialed expertise; a fetish for bipartisanship and compromise as ends in themselves; a tendency to view certain institutions as being outside the baser realm of democratic politics entirely. Its implicit conception of the Supreme Court, however, has been a very real one among centrists for decades and seems likely to make an appearance during the upcoming nomination hearings to replace retiring liberal justice Stephen Breyer.