It’s true that the hearings were used to ‘bash’ nominees so that the respective bases would see that they are ‘doing their job’ but, the nominees were generally voted on and approved… and not just by a small margin.

Now, politics are being injected so far that they aren’t going to even vote on some nominees. I just don’t think that this is a healthy way of doing things for our country. If there was something illegal in their past, or you found that they weren’t qualified, or something about their character etc. I can understand extending the debate…. but just because you don’t have the same political views shouldn’t come into it. Not everybody is going to agree with your point of view…

Politics just gets uglier everyday, when you see this kind of stuff going on – you really start to lose faith in our court system. It’s all about political views, qualifications be damned! Our courts should be the one place that politics take a back seat to common sense and the word of law.

Out of interest, how did you find out about the blog originally?

Funny, Jonathon asked me this same question last night and I first thought it was on your blog, but then we figured out that it was over on Winds of Change.

As for confirmation hearings, many of the questions asked have little to do with past legal decisions, except on the surface. This behavior is by no means new. I met a man who had been denied admission to the Illinois bar (in 1950) on the basis of his refusal to answer questions about his political leanings. He contested; it eventually went to SCOTUS, and he ultimately lost in a 5-4 decision. If this can happen to Professor Anastaplo before the state bar, what’s to stop the Senate from doing the same thing for judicial nominees?

As this country becomes more politicized and this type of ‘Confirmation Hearings and voting’ become the norm, it will just serve to delegiticize the Supreme Court Rulings in the future. Every ruling that they make will be seen as strictly political instead of being based on the law. Do we really want to project this image????

In the past it has been understood that the President, who is given the authority to select a nominee, generally gets who he/she wants as long as the person is qualified and is of good moral character. The country does not stay in one position as far as Conservative or Liberal, the pendulem swings back and forth depending on the circumstances. That is why a judge’s personal ideology isn’t supposed to be questioned – as different Presidents are elected and select nominees the Supreme Court should remain fairly evened out.

The only thing that a hearing should focus on is the judge’s qualifications, and past legal decisions to see if they were based on the law. PERIOD…

I wish his program were in a state which would allow us to do some tests of our own (I emailed him about it, it’s not). It’s an interesting project. Out of interest, how did you find out about the blog originally?