At today’s Roberts confirmation hearings, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) shared his fond regard for the brief 1962 Court hearings for Byron White, which “lasted all of 15 minutes and eight questions.”
Grassley told Roberts to expect a much more probing set of questions, since…
…you are the first nominee of the Internet age. With millions of eyes scrutinizing thousands of downloading pages of writing, not to mention the hundreds of website blogs characterizing the documents that have been produced in an accurate — or more likely inaccurate — way, and opining on every record that you have been involved with, and doing it by the minute. So to some extent, there is no turning back from what we have created here, and you just happen to be the latest victim of such scrutiny.
Bloggers, always characterizing documents and opining! Why won’t they just stop paying attention and let Senators hold the trite 15-minute hearings they really want?