WSJ editor Daniel Henninger sums up the week's pathetic exercise in Washington political theater: the Alito hearings.
The grand hulk of Ted Kennedy ranted that he wanted to subpoena the papers of former National Review publisher William Rusher to get to the bottom of Samuel Alito's membership in the Concerned Alumni of Princeton. At this moment, one sensed that perhaps at last the ghost of Robert Bork had finally been laid to rest. Borking was once a Democratic smear tactic. This week--amid intellectually exhausted and politically befuddled Democrats--it became a laugh track.It appears that the liberal legal critique of conservative jurisprudence is largely incoherent. "Out of the mainstream" is a phrase and nothing more. Interesting notions of the individual's relationship to the state surfaced in the preprinted opening statements of Sens. Kennedy and Leahy, then disappeared. Judge Alito's most thoughtful remarks on justice and the law emerged in exchanges with Sens. Grassley and Sessions. Why do the Democrats seem flat-lined? Because in the 20 years that such liberal opposition leaders as Ralph Neas and Nan Aron taught them to contest nominees with propaganda, their Senate students have largely stopped thinking about the content of the Supreme Court.
They should have kept up. Thanks in large part to a half-century of judicial decisions based on no consistent standard, constitutional law today is a dense and tangled thicket understood only by practicing specialists like Samuel Alito. No surprise, then, that when a Sen. Durbin or Feinstein recited a staff-written question on some point of law and got a careful parsing back from Judge Alito on Bray or Rybar or stare decisis, their follow-up was generally of a piece with Sen. Feinstein's after discussing the machine-gun case: "That's a difficult extrapolation for me to understand, but it's not dispositive." Joe Biden shrewdly avoided this trap by using his time for magical mystery tours through his own life.
The left-wing opposition groups are reported to be frustrated that their standard-bearers are "letting Alito off the hook." What hook? Neither Sam Alito nor John Roberts remotely represents Ted Kennedy's famous "Robert Bork's America" speech. Reasonable people can disagree on the views of these conservative jurists, but first we need reasonable people.
The Dems are doomed on this one.
Posted by Alan at January 13, 2006 12:35 AM