It's not clear why you are rushing to suspend reality in the service of a leftist fetish: maintaining the balance of the court.
Please read posts and understand them before commenting on them. I am not for maintaining the status quo on the court - I want it to move right.
I only pointed out that the democrats are going to use the fact that Alito is to the far right of O'Conner to try to destroy the nomination. They are already doing this, so it seems like you are the one living in fantasy land.
My point was that the democrats, the MSM and even many on the Right are ignoring that Roberts is most likely to the left of Rhenquist.
I think Roberts will turn out to be just as conservative as Rehnquist, though perhaps we should use the term constitutionalist rather than conservative. In reality, there are no conservative judges on the court, if we define that as being a judge who uses his office to forcibly impose conservative policies on the country. The court is currently divided between judges who use the court to force liberalism on the country and judges who don't. The media describe those who don't force liberalism down our throats via judicial fiat as "conservatives" or "right-wingers". But in fact those judges are not the right-wing ideological mirror image of the left-wing judges on the court.
The court isn't divided between judges who would use the court to force the leftist position on culture war issues on the country and judges who would use the court to impose the rightist position on culture war issues on the country. It's divided between judges who would impose those leftist policies and judges who would leave those issues to the voters to decide.
So the entire media characterization of this fight is false. It's not a question of whether we'll be governed by leftist judges or by rightist judges. It's whether we'll be governed by leftist judges or will be allowed to govern ourselves.