Hearings as Theater
Democrats called the Supreme Court nomination hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday a variety of names, all from the same talking points list, apparently. They said the process was “illegitimate”, “a sham” and “a charade”.
I agree completely with those characterizations, but not in the way they mean.
What is a sham or a charade is the mock indignation shown by these individuals, since it was their party that got us to this point to begin with.
It wasn’t Republicans who tore into Robert Bork more than three decades ago, taking the art of injecting politics into a supreme court nomination hear to new heights, or depths. And it wasn’t Republicans who just four years later tried to destroy Clarence Thomas on national television.
But more to the point of today, it wasn’t Republicans that changed the standard for judicial appointments, setting a precedent that logically took us to where we only need the barest of majorities to confirm a justice to the nation’s highest court for a lifetime appointment.
If anything is illegitimate, it’s the torturing of the English language used by Democrats, who claim Republicans are court packing even though they are just trying to get to 9 justices, not 15…and who claim the Barrett nomination is unconstitutional, when it is clearly permitted by the constitution. And those are just statements made by the party’s presidential nominee in the past few days.
It’s bad theater, being played out before us by bad actors. And I mean that in both turns of the phrase.
