Even some with firmly established liberal credentials are taking note of how pointless the way the Democrats are handling the Alito confirmation hearings.
E. J. Dionne writes:
A listless intellectual fog had fallen over the Senate hearing room on Tuesday, the first full day of questioning for Judge Samuel Alito before the Judiciary Committee. As one Democratic senator strode out to the hallway during an afternoon break, he leaned my way and said: “We have to hit him harder.”
The senator was expressing frustration over a process that doesn’t work. It turns out that, especially when their party controls the process, Supreme Court nominees can avoid answering any question they don’t want to answer. Senators make the process worse with meandering soliloquies. But when the questioning gets pointed, the opposition is immediately accused of scurrilous smears. The result: an exchange of tens of thousands of words signifying, in so many cases, nothing — as long as the nominee has the discipline to say nothing, over and over and over.
That doesn’t stop Dionne from criticizing Alito or saying what he thinks the Dems should do to try to stop his confirmation, but he acknowledges how empty the exercise has been.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the political divide, the Wall Street Journal notes that "Borking as lost its bite":
The grand hulk of Ted Kennedy ranted that he wanted to subpoena the papers of former National Review publisher William Rusher to get to the bottom of Samuel Alito’s membership in the Concerned Alumni of Princeton. At this moment, one sensed that perhaps at last the ghost of Robert Bork had finally been laid to rest [JIMMY NOTES: Bork is quite alive, so this is an odd metaphor as phrased]. Borking was once a Democratic smear tactic. This week–amid intellectually exhausted and politically befuddled Democrats–it became a laugh track.
