Once In A While You Can Get Shown The Light…
…in the strangest of places if you look at it right. Some truth today from the unlikeliest of sources:
As questioning of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito resumed Thursday following some raw emotion a day earlier — two senators in a testy exchange and Alito’s wife bursting into tears — a senior Senate Democrat told NBC News that the hearings serve no purpose and should be replaced with a straight up or down vote on the nominee.
“The system’s kind of broken,” Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., told NBC’s “Today” show. He defended the type of questions that apparently unnerved Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann Bomgardner, who briefly left the hearings in tears shortly after Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham told Alito, “I am sorry that you’ve had to go through this. I am sorry that your family has had to sit here and listen to this.”
Americans should know how a nominee interprets the Constitution on key social views, but since nominees refuse to discuss their interpretations, citing the possibility they’d have to rule on them in the future, the hearings serve no real purpose, Biden said.
“The alternative” to hearings, he said, “is just to vote on the Senate floor, just go to the Senate floor and debate the nominee’s statements. … instead of this game where a nominee sits there” and won’t disclose his or her views.
“If the judges aren’t going to talk about it than we should just go to a vote,” he added.
Biden is 100% correct; the whole thing’s a big farce, a chance for posturing and pontificating, but the odds of anything of real value coming out of a hearing of this sort are exceedingly remote. The Bork hearings were the writing on the wall…it’s just taken a long time for anyone in a position of power to read it…
OTOH, it does show how relentlessly partisan most politicians can be, particularly when they realize that their future campaign contributions are riding on their performances during these modern – day Salem Witch Trials.
I kept waiting to see if Kennedy was going to throw Alito into a large tub of water, just to see if he’d float…
Or if Alito turns him into a newt!
…but he got better…
The sad part is that Biden’s laying the travesty of these hearings at the feet of Alito (and presumably Roberts earlier). He’s light years from acknowledging that the problem is that the committee members on both sides of the aisle are merely grandstanding for their constituents and financial supporters. When he spends 75% or more of his alloted time posturing and posing his question, why does he think they’re going to end up with any useful information?
Here’s an idea. Get rid of the committee members’ opening statements. Cut the members alloted time for questioning in half and limit the length of time for each committee member’s questions to 25% of the alloted time. They’d get the more information from the nominee (7.5 minutes v. 5 minutes now) and eliminate the blustering.
The result? The American people would have some insight into the judicial philosophy of the nominee without having to listen to redundant and insulting questions from a phalanx of partisan wolves. And it would only take one day!!
This is not my nose and they dressed me up…
good idea. and questions about pending or hypothetical cases, and any case that might come before the court should be off limits. past writings, opinions, and settled cases, to the extent they don’t violate the above prohibition, would all be fair game.
[...] Failure to make a direct hit on Alito suggests a transcendent defeat for the Democratic judicial confirmation strategy crafted by Kennedy. It did not block all conservatives for appellate courts and failed to dissuade Bush from naming conservatives to the Supreme Court. It was more than a temporary defeat for Kennedy – it was, we can only hope, the beginning of the end for the judicial nomination game as it has been played since the Bork hearings. When even as partisan and pompous a figure as Joe Biden is decrying the system, you know the game is up. Biden is not upset about the unfairness to the nominee, of course – he is admitting that tactically, the ’smearing in the hearing’ has proven itself worthless. It succeeded once, with Bork, but Bork was a contentious personality who was far too willing to give rope to the other side. No one will ever make the mistake of being forthcoming again… [...]
“Bring out yer dead! Bring out yer dead!”
I’m not dead yet.
Yeah, what relish said. The hearings do serve a purpose. However, badgering such as Kennedy displayed yesterday, is going way too far. They don’t even allow badgering of a witness in the most heinous murder trial.
Hey Admin,…
…