We hear it constantly from the right side of the political spectrum.

Courts shouldn’t be full of “judicial activists.” The culprits, in their eyes, usually come from the left. Those liberals are just too prone to “legislate from the bench.” Or so it goes from the right-wing mantra machine.

How did Barack Obama answer that with his choice for the U.S. Supreme Court? The president chose as mainstream, moderate and even-tempered a fellow as he could find. Merrick Garland deserves to take his seat on the nation’s highest court.

His record is exemplary. His temperament and judicial philosophy would seem to fit the bill perfectly for Senate Republicans who hold the key to whether Garland even gets a hearing, let alone a vote by the full Senate.

Now, though, all those qualities that conservatives say they admire in a judge don’t apply. Garland must be too, uh, moderate. Too measured. Too studious. Too mainstream.

Compared to the individual he would replace — the late Justice Antonin Scalia — perhaps there’s some merit to the criticism in the eyes of the Senate Republican caucus.

What they want is another Scalia.

Yes, the late justice was a brilliant legal scholar. He called himself a “strict constitutionalist”; to be honest, I’m not smart enough to argue that point.

I am reasonably intelligent enough, though, to know that he was rigid in his approach to interpreting the Constitution. He was an ideologue. However, his ideology fit nicely with the politicians who control the Senate.

Garland’s doesn’t. He’s too centrist. Too moderate and mainstream.

One man’s ideological purist is another man’s near-perfect fit for the job of interpreting the Constitution.

So, it’s fair to ask: Do the Senate Republicans who keep insisting that the next president make this pick really oppose the current choice on judicial and philosophical grounds, or are they just playing politics?