Do you happen to know if Judges can accept pay for speaking and appearances? Shutting that off would eliminate what is nothing more than beltway politics from the list of things a Judge should properly be concerned with. By "beltway politics" I mean the things one would have to do be sought after for speaking engagements.
I don't know but I can't picture judges speaking for free. I thought Brits point was a good one in that if you only socialize with liberals it would be easy to become "polluted" by their views and that the years that Mier has spent in DC she's never socialized with them,. She's not a party-goer. She may end up proving to be "the peoples judge".