The Hot Air Hearings

Joe Biden wants to scrap Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominees, a thought that has occurred to more than a few of us who've watched this week's Samuel Alito snoozefest.

"Nominees now, Democrat and Republican nominees, come before the United States Congress and resolve not to let the people know what they think about the important issues," said Biden, adding, "The system's kind of broken."

Not that Biden isn't playing a role of his own: Richard Cohen devotes a whole column today to his bloviating during the hearings. "The New York Times had Biden out on Page One -- normally a position to kill for -- only this time it was not a paean to his considerable merits, but an account of how it took him nearly three minutes of throat-clearing to ask his first question and then took the rest of his allocated 30 minutes just to get in four more," he writes. (Dana Milbank of the Post noted that Biden "spoke about his own Irish American roots, his 'Grandfather Finnegan,' his son's application to Princeton [he attended the University of Pennsylvania instead, Biden said], a speech the senator gave on the Princeton campus, the fact that Biden is 'not a Princeton fan,' and his views on the eyeglasses of Sen. Dianne Feinstein.")

In an editorial, USA Today (which noted that "Biden engaged in a rambling, self-indulgent soliloquy") wrote that "[e]nough senatorial hot air was expelled to fill blimps from sea to shining sea" during the hearings. The paper noted phony questions (Orrin Hatch: "Are you against women and minorities attending college?") and "questions" that were pointedly not for the nominee (Lindsey Graham: "This is really not about you, so you don't have to listen. I'm talking to other people right now.") The writer concludes:

Bloviating is nothing new to politics, of course, or to the Senate. Nor is the partisanship that has raised it to gale force. But when senator after senator focuses more on scoring snappy sound bites than on learning a nominee's views, the public is ill-served and the Senate's credibility is undermined. More important, so is confidence in the independence of the court.

Given the stakes, it's too bad so many senators seem so disinterested in gathering facts to make an informed, independent choice.

Let me let you in on a little secret, folks: This is scripted material nearly all the time, something not unlike a play that comes with the occasional ad-lib. (I know, I know, it ain't much of a secret.) The senators, the public, the press, and Alito all knew what the main issues would be going in, and they prepared accordingly. Democrats were – shock! – "troubled" by Alito's past; Republicans, natch, thought he was just peachy. All the real political wrangling, the interesting stuff, goes on behind closed doors, not in the hearings.

So when the Potemkin spectacle is interrupted by something unexpected, the hungry press unsurprisingly pounces. That's why we were treated on last night's "Evening News" to video of Alito's wife crying as Republican Lindsay Graham offered a grandstanding "question" about Democrats ostensibly painting Alito as a bigot. (It was a bit much, incidentally, on Graham's part. Writes Howard Kurtz: "…is it an unfair accusation of racism for Democrats to ask about his association with a group--whose membership he listed in a Reagan administration job application--that was opposed to admitting women and minorities to the university?")

From a press perspective, the question is: Do Martha Alito's tears matter? And the answer, of course, is no, not really. These issues should be addressed, and besides, we're not in Long Dong Silver territory here. But members of the press, desperate for something meaningful or spontaneous, dutifully reported them anyway, and it's hard to fault them too much for grasping at straws. Still, the only real news in her tears, if you can call it that, is that they provide perhaps the best illustration yet of the lack of anything substantial coming out of the hearings.

That's why Biden's suggestion – that nominations go straight to the Senate floor for debate – seems reasonable, at least to this observer. If both sides are just going to worthlessly grandstand, and Alito's not going to answer any questions, than why bother with the nominee? At this point, it's hard to see the harm in exchanging one absurd, mostly worthless process for another. If we're going to be stuck with endless bloviating, at least we can limit the artifice.

And there's another solution, one that begins with this question: Would the senators perform this kabuke if the press didn't air it? It's safe to assume that the cable networks' constant coverage of the hearings contributes to politicians' impulse to grandstand. If the hearings weren't televised or obsessively covered, the process might well be different: More open, more honest, less of a performance than a conversation. It feels wrong to call for less journalistic access to what goes on in these hearings, and it probably is. But when the press corps is reduced to covering a phony spectacle such as this, one can't help but wonder if the time has come for desperate measures.