Careening into the final couple of weeks of John Hickenlooper’s campaign for a job he told everyone a year ago he would hate, the most compelling issue is where he would stand on the ultimate Democratic temper tantrum, the packing of the Supreme Court, should a) he defeat Cory Gardner, b) Joe Biden beat President Trump, and c) the Democrats wrest control of the U.S. Senate. The last observed direction of the Hickenlooper weathervane indicates that he would indeed, probably, support such an act of violence on the separation of powers.

Part of the reason, one surmises, that Hickenlooper holds as much enthusiasm for being a senator as he presumably does for getting a root canal is that he has never much welcomed the idea of embracing a hard decision. He is much more comfortable with delegating that task to advisers, boards, coalitions, commissions, stakeholder groups and so forth. That has its place, to be sure, and it allowed him throughout his governorship to extol the virtues of ”consensus-building” and “collaborative effort,” but as a senator he has a vote; that vote is public, and he alone is accountable for that vote. That thought makes him most uncomfortable.

Hence the clumsy, circumlocutory, and often contradictory answers he has given to the question of his position on packing the court. His latest answer seems to be that he would, if things don’t go his way. In a recent interview, where he was asked the burning question, he eventually got around to saying “my decision on court-packing depends on what these senators decide — not whether they approve or not, whether they put it off.”

It’s a little tough to try and adequately unpack that sentence, but he seems to be saying that he would vote to add justices to the high court — dynamiting the 150-year tradition of maintaining nine Supreme Court justices on the bench — if the current Senate does not punt on its constitutionally defined obligation to grant or withhold consent of the president’s nominee.

He is trying to get away with saying that his decision is not contingent on whether they approve Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination or not — only if they fail to let the next Senate do so. Of course, if they do approve her, they obviously did not wait. Now, is he suggesting that if by some chance the Senate votes Judge Barrett down, he would still be in favor of court packing on the basis of them not waiting? Of course not.

This seems a good time, by the way, for some terminological housekeeping. There seems to be a great deal of confusion surrounding the term “court packing.” For instance, liberal responses on social media (which I regard in much the same way as Hickenlooper did his veto pen — it’s there for emergencies when absolutely unavoidable) tend to deflect the panic over “court packing” with statements along the lines of “conservatives have been packing the court for years.” It’s the kind of thing that makes one despair of the state of civics education in our public schools.

“Court packing,” of course, refers singularly to the practice of adding more judges to the court in an effort to change its philosophical direction. Simply replacing vacancies as they come up with a judge agreeable to the political inclinations of the sitting president and Senate does not fit under the definition. And in any case, liberals have been outdoing conservatives on that score for decades, evidenced by the myriad of things the court has magically discovered hidden in the constitution, and the amount of supra-legislative authority the court has aggrandized itself with over the last half-century or so.

So why the Democrats’ concerted efforts at equivocation on the issue? Well, probably because a NYT poll shows that almost 60% of voters oppose court packing.

As for Hickenlooper’s malleable position on the court, he has said that he harbors concerns over a conservative court, that such a court would (somehow) pose a threat to civil rights. What he is saying is that he doesn’t much like the Constitution as it is written, but rather than go through the laborious process of amending it, or making sure new laws are in line with it, he would much rather bypass all that civil-procedure and separation-of-powers nonsense and let the SCOTUS change it with a juridical magic wand.

All this suggests that Hickenlooper a) possesses an inadequate understanding of the Constitution and the way the American government is supposed to work, or b) that he is being deliberately coy with the voters, playing dumb to obfuscate his motives. Either alternative ought to be disqualifying.