[Supreme Court]

Mailing It In

The Democrats are no longer bothering to try to find loose threads in the Roberts nomination. I listened to Leahy, Feingold, Feinstein, and Schumer this morning, and none of them were doing anything more than creating a record for the history books. Feingold queried Roberts on his view of ethics practices--changed, apparently, under Rehnquist. He seemed wholly disinterested in the responses, apparently mainly trying to shore up his cred as the ethics guy.

Feinstein was the most absurd, asking broad political questions, and expecting Roberts to retrofit these to judicial questions. She asked a general question about Reagan subverting congressional funding during the Iran-Contra period, and asked whether he thought it was permissable for the executive branch to dodge the legislative. It wasn't even a real question--even I wouldn't have answered it. Schumer and Leahy were talking to their constituents, not Roberts.

By today, it was clear to everyone watching these hearings that Roberts is a lock. He's smart, mild, and courtly, and no one on the left has mounted a serious attack against his candidacy. Dems seem to have entered these hearings with no steel in their spines, and they sure haven't found any along the way. Having been outsmarted by Roberts, the senators are apparently content to let him saunter to easy confirmation.

If he turns out to be a radical jurist, history may look back through these records and ask where the Dems were during confirmation.