Senate Hearings For SCOTUS Are Relatively New And Essentially Worthless

TW: That the Senate hearings for SCOTUS nominees are a fandango is not news. What I did not realize is that they are a relatively new process. The hearings are another one of those extra-legal procedures the Senate manages to create more or less out of the blue which provide at best dubious value. I agree with Fineman lets cut out these farces. Go back to the old procedure, a POTUS nominates a candidate, the Senate votes on the candidate after conducting its due diligence without the hearings.

From Howard Fineman at Newsweek:
" ...We need to stop holding Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Put them out of their misery. They have no clear purpose—or at least no useful one. They make everyone involved look bad. They are worse than a waste of time, because they confuse the public about what the Supreme Court does and undermine respect for law and judges. They aren't even good television anymore.

Nowhere is it written that the Senate must cross-examine nominees. That happened for the first time in 1925. President Eisenhower made three recess appointments, meaning that Earl Warren, William Brennan, and Potter Stewart all were seated and voting on the court before the Senate scrutinized them. The first hearing to become a TV soap opera was Sandra Day O'Connor's in 1981—not coincidentally, a year after CNN invented the cable news business. Six years later, the Democrats savaged the hapless (and unrehearsed) Judge Robert Bork. A verb was invented. To bork: to deny a nominee a seat on the high court by portraying him or her as a mentally unstable wingnut.

A half generation later, the folk memory of Bork has combined with warp-speed, saturation media coverage to destroy what meager value the hearings ever had. The theory was that senators needed to handle the merchandise before giving "advice and consent" on the nomination. But now—recognizing the viral danger of YouTube and the like—the nominees arrive on the Hill encased in hard, shrink-wrapped plastic, the kind you can't open without pointed scissors and a kitchen knife. The game (and it is one) becomes an atavistic search for an emotional gotcha moment, a test more appropriate to a hockey goalie than a Supreme Court justice. As long as she did not have a "meltdown," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, Sotomayor would be confirmed. A worthy standard, indeed...."
http://www.newsweek.com/id/207411