reflections

What are those Senators doing?

Listening to the confirmation hearings for John Roberts has been an eye-opening experience for me. It is widely held that having open meetings with full public scrutiny will give the public confidence in the process by which our politicians make decisions. The truth is that it gives the public indigestion.

While listening off and on to the National Public Radio (NPR) coverage, I spent a lot of time listening to the Senators congratulate each other, expound on positions that they had once taken and generally utilize the public venue to tell their constituents just how well they were looking after their welfare. In fact, they took up most of the time with their speechmaking and left very little time for the actual question / answer process that should have taken place.

Still, maybe that is the way that it has always been and we were just happily ignorant of what really went on and blissfully assumed that our Senators were looking out for our welfare and not their own.

While main stream media is often rightfully criticized for their bias, in this case, the media (e.g. Nina Toteberg) was able to shed more light on the subject than the Senators did, maybe because the media was better prepared. At least, when they referenced various memos by Roberts or Supreme Court Decisions in the past, they appeard to understand the meaning of those documents and were not just reading words written by some staffer like Senator Kennedey appeared to do.

My final conclusion was that putting a politician on television or the radio acts not to give us a glimpse of how they work but rather gives them a chance to make speeches in support of their own preconceived notions.

The only exception to this that I heard was Senator Biden. He, at least, gave us a glimpse at the wide range of inputs he used in making a decisions, from comment by personal friends that had personal knowledge of the nominee or the public writings and previous judicial opinions of the nominee to the actual testimony in the hearing. It seemed to me that he placed the least weight on the events in the hearing and that is probably good.

As for the rest, they probably will not get it. The history of confirmation hearings is filled with mistaken evaluations of nominees, from Charles Evan Hughes who was attacked as being too pro buisiness to Earl Warren who was attacked by some liberal groups as not being in touch with reality since he had spent many years as a prosecutor. As Chief Justices, they both guided the court through key decisions that were exactly the opposite from what their detractors feared. And Warren came to the position with no judcial experience at all.

Maybe all this openness is not a good thing if you need to have confidence in government.