Toothless Wolf Questions Roberts

CBS' Andrew Cohen Says Senate Could Do A Better Job In Hearings

(CBS)  Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) summed it up when he said he was surprised that his Republican colleagues had focused so much Monday on outlining the areas of questioning they think Roberts should not have to face - not a particularly good argument to start with, said Schumer.

It did cross my mind that if Roberts were as much a part of the legal "mainstream" as the White House professes him to be, there should be and there would be less inclination on the part of the president's party to shield the nominee from so much questioning.

Many of the folks who Monday said the Committee should go soft on Roberts were perfectly eager to encourage much more zealous questioning of Democratic judicial candidates when the situation then arose. And some Republican Senators, like Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) want to vigorously question nominee Roberts because they want him to roll back abortion rights rather than buttress them, as many Senate Democrats hope.

This hypocrisy, in case you are wondering, isn't limited to the GOP. Many of the same Democrats who - in flusher times (think Breyer and Ginsburg during the first years of the Clinton reign) - advocated restrained questioning of Court nominees made the opposite argument Monday.

You would think that the glass house reality of being a Senator in times like this would act as a brake on such silliness. But it hasn't and it doesn't.

What's the point of having a Committee confirmation hearing if a majority on the Committee don't want the nominee to say too much about the issues that are relevant to his role? What's the point of having a hearing if it isn't meaningful?

The point is that in politics, too often style matters more than substance - that's why some senators Monday whined about the impact of media coverage on confirmation hearings even as they spent several hours preening for the cameras during "opening statements" that were generally as sappy as they were unnecessary.

Here's what the rule ought to be, for liberal and conservative judicial nominees alike, and whether the Senate and the White House are controlled by Republicans or Democrats.

It should be presumed that a judicial nomination hearing, especially for the Supreme Court and even more so for a Supreme Court Chief Justice, is designed to reveal as much as is humanly possible about the nominee's legal principles and philosophy except when the public discussion of those principles and philosophies would demonstrably harm public perception in the nominee's ability to fairly judge future cases.

If this were the rule Monday, we would have heard much more substance from the Committee and far fewer excuses; we would have heard the senators speak more like statesmen than apologists.

What is about to take place is enormously important to your life and mine - on this point all of the pols agree. In fact, given Roberts' relatively young age, it could be the single most important hearing on anything having to do with the law that we will see in a generation.

But if Monday's start is a true preview into what we are about to see, you should have very little confidence that this Committee, as presently constituted, is going to help reveal what you really need to know about the guy who is about to become only the 17th Chief Justice of the United States.

That's a shame and it always will be: no matter how negligently the Senate handled Supreme Court nominees back in the 19th century.