Generally, when you have a hearing for a position, the members of the panel are the ones doing the hearing.
Apparently nobody told the Senate Judiciary Committee this crucial fact when they set the stage for their first confirmation hearing for U.S. Circuit judge Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court. The hearing, which started early on the morning of Oct. 12, began with opening statements from the 22 sitting members of the committee, either in person or by video conference call.
The members of the committee proceeded to give speech after speech for five hours. Judge Barrett should receive the nomination for no other reason than her frankly incredible mental stamina and force of will as she listened, with seeming attention, to people talk about her for the better part of the morning. When she finally was able to talk for about 20 minutes, Barrett essentially gave a recap of how she came to be sitting on the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and her rather box-standard pitch as a textual originalist.
Republicans came out of the gate with canned diatribes about the importance of civics and originalism, defenses of their decision to have the hearing in the first place (which, again, are going to convince literally no one not already on-board the ACB confirmation train), and preemptively attacking Democrats on questions of Barrett’s religious beliefs and the political nature of her appointment. Democrats, meanwhile, spent most of their air time showing the committee pictures of families aided by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in an effort to insinuate Barrett’s evilness because she opposed certain provisions of the ACA on legal grounds in some of her writings.
During the whole of the first hearing, I couldn’t help but compare it to kabuki theatre, but that would be an insult to kabuki. It was more like, as Macbeth famously said of life, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Subsequent hearings did not improve my assessment of the proceedings, although the nominee herself did not make an effort to be cogent either. Barrett, very intelligently, chose to abide scrupulously to the precedent of previous Supreme Court nominees, like Ginsburg, who would not prejudice themselves by commenting on cases currently in open litigation. There is just one problem with this approach: every single legal dispute that American citizens are likely to care about is currently under litigation.
For what it’s worth, I’m one of the people who believes that Barrett is an excellent choice for the Supreme Court, but part of me wonders why, in this hyper-partisan swamp we’re all swimming in, anyone bothered to set up a hearing at all. It seems the main goal of the hearings was not to learn anything about the candidate, but to legitimize her for the few hold-out Republican senators needed for her confirmation. Democrats went into the hearings attempting to paint Barrett as cartoonishly evil and failed, and now by the looks of things she will be confirmed just in time for the election.
The platitudes repeated by the senators on the Judiciary Committee, that the Supreme Court is an auspicious seat of neutrality and impartial arbiters of justice, rings hollow for both sides. For the Right, that hasn’t been true since the Warren court, and for the Left, the ramrodding of Barrett’s nomination represents, from Republicans, a shot across the bow contesting their control of the Court.
I’m among those who thinks that honesty, even if painful, is the best policy, and the honest truth is that the days of one side hearing the other seem to be fast approaching their end. Not a pleasant thought to go into a highly-contentious election with.
Photo Credit / Associated Press
