{"id":90864,"date":"2020-10-16T02:52:00","date_gmt":"2020-10-15T23:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/why-the-amy-coney-barrett-hearings-were-basically-a-waste-all-around\/"},"modified":"2020-10-16T02:52:00","modified_gmt":"2020-10-15T23:52:00","slug":"why-the-amy-coney-barrett-hearings-were-basically-a-waste-all-around","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/why-the-amy-coney-barrett-hearings-were-basically-a-waste-all-around\/","title":{"rendered":"#Why the Amy Coney Barrett hearings were basically a waste all around"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Why the Amy Coney Barrett hearings were basically a waste all around<\/strong>”
\n<\/p>\n

\n Judge Amy Coney Barrett \u00adacquitted herself very well at her confirmation hearings, which means, quite often, she refused to answer questions.<\/p>\n

Barrett is an exemplary nominee who was knowledgeable, clear and composed throughout the three days of questioning, but not always responsive.<\/p>\n

She can\u2019t be blamed for this. She played the game<\/a> as the rules have been established for decades and played it well. It is to take nothing away from her to wonder whether this longstanding norm of nominees running away from many substantive questions serves the Senate or the country well.<\/p>\n

The court has taken on an outsize role in our national life, while at the same time nominees say less than ever about their views during the one chance the senators have to vet them publicly. This is a bizarre disconnect. You\u2019d think we\u2019d want to hear more from a prospective member of a body that elections are explicitly fought over and that, for better or (mostly) worse, determines how we are governed.<\/p>\n

It was the confirmation battle over Robert Bork, of course, that changed everything. As Ilya Shapiro notes in his recent book, \u201cSupreme Disorder<\/a>,\u201d there were five days of the hearings involving Bork himself, who was highly accomplished but acerbic and uncoachable.<\/p>\n

The journalist Theodore White famously said upon hearing Barry Goldwater\u2019s unapologetic 1964 convention speech, \u201cMy God, he\u2019s going to run as Barry Goldwater!\u201d Likewise, Bork testified as Bork \u2014 brilliant and provocative \u2014 and it was a political debacle.<\/p>\n

Ruth Bader Ginsburg set the new standard. As Shapiro writes, Ginsburg executed a \u201cpincer movement\u201d at her hearings, refusing to discuss both specific fact patterns (because they might come before the court) and abstract matters (because \u201ca judge could deal in specifics only\u201d).<\/p>\n

This didn\u2019t leave much to discuss. John Roberts and Elena Kagan deflected the same way Ginsburg had. For her part, Barrett relentlessly hewed to the Ginsburg rule. She commented on her own past writings and decisions and general<\/a> legal philosophy, but wouldn\u2019t get drawn out on much else.<\/p>\n

For long stretches, the only drama was whether she could say, once again, that she couldn\u2019t answer without betraying any impatience with senators asking the same thing over and over again.<\/p>\n

The rationale for this, going back to Ginsburg, is that a judge can\u2019t comment on matters that might come before the court, a category so capacious that it includes almost anything of public interest.<\/p>\n

This is much too far-reaching a standard. It\u2019s one thing to commit to vote a certain way in a given case; it\u2019s another to conceal basic views on the law behind a curtain of judicial impartiality.<\/p>\n

On top of this, the Ginsburg rule makes what a nominee will talk about completely arbitrary. We know a fair amount about how Barrett views gun rights because she wrote a dissent in a gun case and couldn\u2019t avoid discussing it. But if she could talk about that in detail, why not other important questions?<\/p>\n

No fair-minded person would conclude that having engaged on the Second Amendment openly in a confirmation hearing, she is now unfit to hear gun cases on the Supreme Court. Indeed, if making your views clear on such matters is disqualifying, all the current Supreme Court justices \u2014 extensively on the record about all manner of legally fraught questions \u2014 should be replaced by people with no known views.<\/p>\n

The Ginsburg rule is highly convenient to all administrations when they make app<\/a>ointments. A change would have to be forced by the Senate, acting collectively to demand that future nominees discuss and debate the law with a forthrightness we haven\u2019t seen since Bork.<\/p>\n

But that won\u2019t happen. Neither party would want to make the process even harder on its nominees, and, more broadly, Congress is the least self-respecting branch, almost never standing up for its prerogatives.<\/p>\n

Senators can express great frustration at not getting answers to their questions, but this is a practice they\u2019ve long tolerated and won\u2019t change.<\/p>\n

Twitter<\/a>: @RichLowry <\/em>\n <\/div>\n

\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#Why the Amy Coney Barrett hearings were basically a waste all around” Judge Amy Coney Barrett \u00adacquitted herself very well at her confirmation hearings, which means, quite often, she refused to answer questions. Barrett is an exemplary nominee who was knowledgeable, clear and composed throughout the three days of questioning, but not always responsive. She…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":90865,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/10\/AFP_ACB.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[75861,71982,71403,75726,71404],"class_list":["post-90864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-10-15-20","tag-amy-coney-barrett","tag-ruth-bader-ginsburg","tag-senate-hearing","tag-supreme-court"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90864\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}