Dahlia Lithwick on Why Do We Talk About Judges This Way?
Nobody in America believes the judicial confirmation system works. Not the senators who eat up precious questioning time with windy speeches about pet projects back home; not the interest groups who scour every sordid instant of a nominee’s background for evidence that they are unfit for the bench; and not the American public, whose experiences of constitutional interpretation and judicial philosophy are reduced in a few days on C-SPAN to bumper-sticker claims and counter claims.
The first days of Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the high court have been rather par for the course, by these measures. Senators have made speeches but said very little. The interest groups were orbiting around some alternate reality long before the nominee had even been named. And the American people found themselves forming opinions about Judge Sotomayor’s judicial philosophy and constitutional fitness, based largely on whether her life story somehow resonated, and whether they felt good or bad about a single line from an eight page speech she gave in 2001.