All the Rules Are Changing
The Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing into the sexual-assault allegations against the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was largely useless as a substitute for a meaningful fact-finding inquiry. It was depressingly informative in another respect, marking further deterioration in the norms undergirding the Senate’s discharge of its constitutional advice and consent duties.
Honored imperfectly and sometimes in the breach, those norms have been generally accepted. The Senate would give a significant measure of deference to the president’s ideological preferences, but it would attend to the objective requirements of assuring that the nominee possessed the requisite experience, qualifications, and temperament. The late Republican Senator Charles “Mac” Mathias, who served on the Judiciary Committee for 18 years, wrote in 1987 that “a president is entitled to reflect his judicial and political philosophy.” The Senate’s job is to “satisfy itself that the nominee before it is fully qualified, by virtue of education, experience, integrity, and character, to be granted a lifetime
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