Even that won't necessarily help. A Circuit Court judge cannot overrule established SCOTUS precedents.
Once a person is on SCOTUS with a lifetime job and no further promotion ambition, and 1/9th of ultimate power, the thought process can change.
True, but he can ignore them and inject his own beliefs. Those are the ones that should be automatically eliminated from consideration.
If a person has a long term track record (10+ years) of following an originalist philosophy and deferring to supreme court precedents when applicable then the odds are good that he will continue to do so.
What is certain is that once a judicial activist, always a judicial activist. Even one that tends to lean right will not be a reliable vote and will eventually veer to the left as all activists do.
Weed out the judicial activists and any who don't have enough of a track record to make an informed judgment. Sure, this may have eliminated Rhenquist and Thomas, but they were not the only originalist or textualist judges on the planet to choose from. This would have also eliminated Souter, O'Conner, Stephens and Blackmun.
I have strong feelings that Kennedy would have also been eliminated as I doubt his record was really as stellar as we are led to believe. He was probably just a judicial activist that tended to lean to the right at that time.