Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Why I Love Dahlia

If there was just one person in the world I could choose to watch the Roberts confirmation hearings with, it would be Dahlia Lithwick:

Senate Democrats have had it up to here with "John Roberts the lawyer." And it's hard to blame them. John Roberts the lawyer won't answer any questions. At least, as the sole arbiter of what questions he'll answer, he's doing a rather phenomenal job of broadly defining great classes of questions as unanswerable:

  • He won't answer questions about any case currently
    pending before the Supreme Court (abortion, right-to-die);
  • He won't answer questions about any case that might someday conceivably be pending before the Supreme Court (separation of powers, contested presidential elections);
  • He won't answer questions he's decided on the court of appeals (since they may
    someday conceivably be pending before the Supreme Court);
  • He won't answer questions about prior nominees (Robert Bork) because that is not appropriate;
  • He can't answer questions about general legal doctrine because they are too general;
  • He can't answer questions about specific legal doctrine because they are too specific;
  • He can't answer questions about his early memos because a robot wrote them.
And that's only the beginning. It continues to devolve into Bad Scene Class at Inside the Actors' Studio - and people wonder why we are all fucked.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Grisha! My husband thinks Roberts is the perfectly pre-assembled Neo-Con. That someone grabbed him in the 80s and has molded and shaped him for exactly what's occuring now.

What do you think of that theory?