McCain says he wants judges to be "impartial", but says nothing about them following the Constitution. If one side in a case is seeking to violate the Constitution, the judge should be strongly prejudiced against that side.
Further, while "litigating from the bench" is a nice catchphrase, there are in fact times when so-called litigation from the bench is in fact entirely appropriate. Any rules that judges adopt to make a decision, however, must be give way to actual legislation.
By way of analogy: suppose a person is appointed to be the Official Jellybean Counter for a contest. His job is to determine how many jellybeans are in a jar.
If three contestants guess 5000, 5001, and 5002 and he discovers that the jar contains 5000 whole jellybeans and two half-jellybeans, and if nothing in the contest rules specifies how partial jellybeans are to be counted, the Jellybean Counter would be required to decide on a rule for counting half jellybeans. If before the next year's contest, however, the sponsors change the official rules to specify how such partial beans should be counted, the counter's job would be to count using those rules; the rules he'd drafted would be irrelevant.
The proper way to describe a judge's role is to say what the law is, not to decide what it will be.
I never understand why a true socialist wouldn't just move to one of the many socialistic countries that have the socialized medicine and all the other centralized cradle to grave planning that they want, and leave America the land of the free alone. Every liberal idea and policy has already been tried to the fullest extent somewhere and the resulting ruined the lives of millions of people cannot be retroactively undone.
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!