“Football doesn’t build character. It reveals it.” – old football axiom, frequently attributed to former Buffalo Bills and Kansas City Chiefs coach Marv Levy.
Sen. Joe Biden told NBC’s Today hostess Katie Couric on Thursday that it would be better to skip judicial confirmation hearings and simply send a nominee’s name and record to the Senate floor for a vote. “Just go to the Senate floor and debate the nominee's statements,” Biden said, “instead of this game.”
After this week’s embarrassing performance in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s consideration of Judge Samuel Alito’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Biden is looking everywhere for someone to blame and trying to find some way to shift the focus from where it actually belongs: on the long time Committee Democrats.
It was Senate Judiciary Democrats, led by Biden and Sen. Ted Kennedy, who destroyed the value of the hearing process nearly 20 years ago when they sought and got intellectually honest responses from Judge Robert Bork during his nominations hearing – and then proceeded to smear and distort the positions of an intelligent and decent man. Remember Kennedy's speech, given within the hour after Bork's name was sent to the Committee?: "In "Robert Bork's America . . . women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution...." So much for a soft answer turning away wrath.
Then, against all honor, the Democrats acted as though they took Kennedy's words seriously, and committee calumnies took their toll. In defeating the Bork nomination, they set an all-time low in Senatorial dignity, while creating the blueprint for future Democrat opposition to all Republican Supreme Court nominees.
In this historical context, Biden’s opposition to confirmation hearings is like the Boston Strangler coming out against fingerprints. He refuses to own up to his long-term, central role in the vivisection of what could be a useful lesson in democracy.
By turning the hearings into a cat-and-mouse game, with Biden and the Democrats playing the role of Roe-baiting felines, Republican presidents and their nominees are forced to choose between forthright responses concerning the craven shallowness and anti-democratic underpinnings of the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling, and a cagey reliance on the “impropriety” of judging cases that “may someday” come before them. The former path means certain devastation, while the latter means likely elevation.
Through it all, Biden remains as shameless as Ted Kennedy at the breakfast bar at Shoney’s. Instead of admitting his own and his fellow Democrats' responsibility for poisoning a useful exercise, Biden instead argues that the hearings themselves are the problem.
And while it is true that the hearings have become, as Biden himself in the past termed them, a kabuki dance, the bigger, darker truth is that, as they are currently constructed, they tell us more about the senators on the committee than they do about the nominee. And that is very bad for Democrats.
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