A couple of weeks ago I lamented that the process of Senate confirmation of Supreme Court nominees had become so political, and such a minefield for the candidates, that it was next to useless as a method of vetting the would-be Justice's qualifications.
As the process of confirming Sonia Sotomayor winds down to its inevitable conclusion, the party-line vote in the Judiciary Committee only serves to highlight the degree to which this is true. With the exception of Senator Lindsey Graham, evidently the only committee member that realizes his party lost the election, Republicans on the committee decided to throw a childish tantrum and voted "no" on Sotomayor. (Democrats have behaved similarly in the past.)
It's not just politics by politicians, though; now the National Rifle Association seeks to usurp the Constitutionally-mandated prerogatives of the Senate by warning that Senators' votes pro/con on Sotomayor will become a part of its rankings as to who's gun-friendly. This in effect seeks to substitiute the NRA's narrow-issue legal judgment for that of our elected representatives.
In today's paper, I thought the usually perceptive David Broder, in his column entitled "Past the Judicial Wars" was going to offer some original thinking on how to get out of this blind alley. No such luck. Broder notes that the senior Democrat and Republican on the Judiciary Committee seem to have taken the high road and suggest that's the answer. Unfortunately, the fact that only these two most senior Senators have performed their duty conscientiously shows how bad things have become; we have a right to expect that they all would do so, and in the past, most did.
So the problem remains; how might the Senate be liberated to consider a Supreme Court nominee on his/her merits?
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