I did not know about Bumatay-I thought for some reason Max thought Kennedy was also gay. Not one of my sharpest moments.
Standing up your date with the Senate is one sure way to tank your nomination.
~Max
We used to think inciting a mob to attack the Capitol was a sure way to get impeached and removed from office.
The trend is for all of the President’s party to vote yes, and all of the opposition to vote no. I doubt that Judge Jackson in 2022 could get away with flipping Josh Hawley the double bird and walking out; Manchin and a few other old-school Democrats wouldn’t stand for it.
But if this trend continues, at some point a President and Majority Leader are just going to say “Good morning, the nominee is X, we’ll be voting after lunch”. That was done at times in the nineteenth century, there’s no rule that says nominees have to endure several days of insults as a hazing ritual before taking their seats. The hearing at this point is just an unnecessary vestige of the days before hyper-partisanship ruled everything.
Very much this.
Hopefully it’ll be a while, but as soon as there is an R president and R senate, they won’t be bothering with confirmation hearings anymore, as that’s just a chance for people to point out their nominee’s unethical or illegal behavior.
It’ll go straight from the list handed over by the Heritage Foundation to taking their seat on the respective court.
If they could get Candace Owes, they would.
Lol no. She’d learn that lesson quite quickly.
Actually, the modern* confirmation process began because - eghast! - Woodrow Wilson nominated a Jewish man to the Supreme Court. Louis Brandeis was certainly brilliant and proved highly influential as a jurist - a University is named for him, he was a stalwart against corporate power, and he’s largely responsible for all of this “right to privacy” business in constitutional jurisprudence - but he needed to be “vetted” before he was finally confirmed 47 to 22.
*in reading my own cite, I see that Brandeis didn’t actually attend the hearings, so I don’t know when that part of the circus started.
Yay!
Ah yes - Collins and her “concerns”.
Very Collins – once the matter is decided, buttress her “moderate” credentials by voting with the Democrats.
The most reliable useless moderate voter in history.
Not when Senators can use the opportunity to grandstand. They won’t give up that potential screen time.
Yes, indeed. That said, she’s the first Republican to come out and say she’ll definitely support, so between that and Joe Manchin earlier, that’s the ball game. It’s officially a “bipartisan” approval and now there’s really nothing the GOP can do to stop it.
Susan “Concern” Collins. Worst biker nickname ever.
Yes, but if it’s an R president and an R Senate, why would they want to give the D’s a chance to grandstand?
Seems, especially if the nominee is controversial in any way, they would be better not giving the D’s a chance to say their piece in the hearings.
Because they themselves want to grandstand. Even though this was a D justice, plenty of D Senators got a chance to grandstand and then posted their grandstanding to social media.
I kind of agree with you both. There is nothing more important to Senators of either party than the opportunity to play to the camera about their outrage, or their outrage over the opposition’s outrage, over a Supreme Court nominee. So I think it’s unlikely we’ll ever get to the “done in an afternoon” stage.
But with confirmation votes becoming almost exclusively partisan, the only thing that could derail an R nomination in an R Senate is some sort of horrible personal revelation or an absolutely terrible gaffe by the nominee. The longer a confirmation takes, the more opportunity for those to come up.
Barrett was a month from nomination to confirmation. I expect the next R nominee/R Senate to be about two weeks.
Frankly, after Kavanaugh, (and…checking notes…Thomas) I don’t think that would matter either.
Maybe if the nominee attended one of those cocaine orgies Madison Cawthorn keeps getting invited to. . .
I mean the GOP used the Kavanaugh questions as some sort of “cancel culture” thing. And ran on how unfair the Democrats were for doing it.