Compare & Contrast

Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, January 17, 2006:

But interpreting the law, and the Constitution in particular, is not the mechanistic enterprise that Roberts and Alito describe. True, the pair have ample company, historically and politically: Many other jurists have clung to the notion that the law is far more science than art, and the Roberts-Alito vision is a highfalutin version of President Bush's stock imprecations against judges legislating from the bench.

Yet the judge's job, as Roberts and Alito surely know, is far more complicated and mysterious. That is, after all, what makes it worth doing and what makes who is nominated to the high court matter. And it is what I find so frustrating about the vapidity of their answers -- and the inability of the confirmation process, as currently constructed, to elicit much beyond these formulaic incantations about the rule of law.

Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, August 11, 2010:

The Supreme Court confirmation process has been degraded into a partisan political fight, in which senators of each side line up, with a few odd defections, with their own party. . .

I don't care who started it. What concerns me is the corroded state of the confirmation process and the prospect of worse to come.

(via Bench Memos)