We’ve all seen it in Supreme Court confirmation hearings: Conservative senators bristle at liberal nominees; liberal senators bristle at conservative nominees.

The difference? Conservatives lament liberal appointees’ tendency to depart from the Constitution’s language. Liberals lament the conservatives’ tendency to cleave to it.

Case in point: Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse accused Republicans of looking for a nominee to bring about their desired political results. Talk about the New England crackpot calling the kettle black.

The conservative view, on matters from abortion to gay rights, is to let the Constitution’s actual 10th Amendment to rule the day, allowing the states to fashion their own laws on how much life to protect in the womb and how much homosexual marriage to legally recognize.

In the various states, conservatives obviously will fight to protect the unborn and the historic definition of marriage, an enormous departure from the modern judicial fabrication of a national “right” to end prenatal life or “right” to have gay marriages viewed as the equal to heterosexual unions.

Neither are rights. They are things some constituencies want passionately, and they should be debated in the states.

It is the left that seeks to mandate its worldview by judicial fiat, a legacy of whims too often based not on law but on social wish lists.

Sonia Sotomayor repeatedly expressed her view that a “wise Latina,” by virtue of her outlook, is a better judge than a white man. If that is not racism, the word has no meaning.

She sought to deny white and Hispanic firefighters their deserved promotions in a Connecticut case because black aspirants did not pass the test. This is racism punctuated by activism. All of this is an instant disqualifier for the highest court in the land.

Much has been made of “empathy,” an instinct that is a vital part of human kindness but a complete irrelevancy to the law.

Whitehouse, the Democrat from Rhode Island, sought lamely Monday to bolster the absurdity of the empathy argument: “The courtroom can be the only sanctuary for the little guy,” he pined, “when the forces of society and elected officialdom will lend him no ear.”

What utter nonsense. In a million cases that come before the Supreme Court, the “little guy” often will be on the side of the law, but sometimes not. A big, despised corporation or the big, nasty government often will be wrong, but sometimes not.

The job of a judge is to be as blind to whom is before the court as the statue of Lady Justice, blindfolded with her scales held aloft to weigh only – only! – the merits of the case before her.

But Sotomayor, in speeches and rulings, has shown a habit of pulling down that metaphoric blindfold to see who is before her, in order to gauge what she thinks of them before ruling.

“Empathy for one party is always prejudice against another,” proclaimed ranking Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, nine words that cut with clarity to disembowel the most artful posings of those who view the Supreme Court as some empowered leveler of our national playing field.

The sports analogy is useful: In the recent NBA finals, the referees could have called ticky-tack fouls against the oft-crowned champion Los Angeles Lakers against the upstart Orlando Magic, a team the officials could have aided by turning their heads when they broke the rules.

The righteous public revulsion at such an outrage should be the same reaction when a judge subjugates the law to some self-created storyline of “fairness.”

The only judicial fairness is found in impartiality, an attribute Sotomayor may claim all week. But she has sufficiently abandoned it to such a degree that only one question remains: Which Republicans will realize that neither political correctness, nor energized Hispanic voters, nor their own self-preservation instincts are as important as protecting the Constitution from this nominee?

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