In the Lion's Den, Sound and Fury, and a Few Tears
In a modern, marbled star chamber on Capitol Hill, Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito's opponents came to cripple him, to stain him as extreme. A bigot. Sexist. Unethical. Unfit for the high court. But unhappily, as it turned out, it was his wife they broke.
When Martha-Ann Bomgardner's chin quivered and her face crumpled into tears as she sat behind her stolid husband during his Senate confirmation hearings, it was all over.
It was over for Democrats, whose baffling decision to hang so much of their campaign to tar Alito on his long-ago membership in a regressive Princeton alumni club succeeded only in making them look desperate. It was over for liberal interest groups whose legitimate concerns about the nominee's antipathy toward abortion rights and captivation with executive power evaporated with the tears and the hapless strategy of their friends in the Senate. And it was all but over for opponents of Alito, 55, the conservative appeals court judge who, like a sturdy ship berthed in a still harbor, calmly and colorlessly weathered 18 hours before the Senate Judiciary Committee, answering and deflecting more than 700 questions with nary a misstep. In the process, he almost surely guaranteed that the full Senate will vote soon to confirm him as the 110th justice on the Supreme Court.
But the question lingers: Should it be quitting time, too, for judicial confirmation hearings, which, in these profoundly partisan times, have devolved into sideshows of televised senatorial egomania and political propaganda? Nominees arrive prepped to within an inch of their lives to be bland, noncommittal. Opposition senators resort to personal innuendo for traction. And supporters perform like trained seals, lobbing softballs and bouquets, and musing ad nauseam about their pet issues.
Even camera-loving Joe Biden, the famously long-winded Delaware Democrat, suggested that the system is broken. Maybe nomination debates should occur only on the Senate floor, just as they did up until 1925. So succinct. So unlike Biden. So right on. You'll certainly get no argument from Bomgardner.
This story appears in the January 23, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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