On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a confirmation hearing for Rebecca Taibleson, President Donald Trump’s pick for a seat on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Under most Republican presidents, Taibleson’s résumé would make her a shoo-in: clerkships with then-D.C. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Justice Antonin Scalia, stints in BigLaw and the Office of the Solicitor General, and a decade and counting as a federal prosecutor in Wisconsin. In 2018, before the various sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh became public, she was the guest of honor at a Federalist Society event titled “The Judge Kavanaugh I Know.” After the allegations became public, Taibleson and another former Kavanaugh clerk wrote a Fox News op-ed defending him as “one of the most honorable men we have had the privilege to know.”

In other words, Taibleson’s conservative legal movement credentials are strong, and the strongest of any of the five names for the seat put forth by the state’s bipartisan nominating commission, which Republican Senator Ron Johnson and Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin run together. Since her nomination was announced, Taibleson has earned generous praise from Trump administration insiders, establishment Republican types, conservative pundits, and one terminally online law professor hoping for a nomination of his own someday.

Under Trump, however, Taibleson is considered insufficiently conservative by many of the culture war zealots whose ideas are alarmingly influential in the right-wing ecosystem these days. Her offenses, as set forth in a joint statement this week signed by an assortment of think tank gremlins, include donations to former West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin and to the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, a nonprofit that participates in programming for LGBTQ Jews in the area. They also fault her for not quitting the Solicitor General’s office immediately after Trump’s election loss in 2020, and for having the gall, as a law student, to spend a summer interning at the Department of Justice back when Barack Obama was president.

“There is no evidence Taibleson is bold or fearless, battle tested or strong on the issues,” Townhall columnist Ken Blackwell wrote earlier this week. “Instead, the evidence suggests she is a weak pick in an important circuit with serious national consequences.”

Taibleson’s performance on Wednesday should assuage these concerns. Like many Trump nominees, she pointedly declined to treat Obergefell v. Hodges or Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court cases that protect the constitutional rights to same-sex marriage and to married couples’ access to contraceptives, as “correctly decided” or “settled law.”