Via The Supreme Court Nomination Blog:
The opening day of the hearings, Tuesday, Sept. 6, will involve no questioning of the nominee. That session, to be held in the Senate’s ornate and historic Caucus Room, will include statements by members of the Committee, administering the oath to Roberts, and his opening statement.
After that, the hearings, with questioning by the senators, will move on Wednesday, Sept. 7, to a Judiciary Committee hearing room in the Hart Senate Office Building.
There will be at least two rounds of questioning. Each senator will have 30 minutes in the opening round, and each 20 minutes in the second. The letter said the Committee would determine later whether to have further rounds, and how long they would last.
One session will be closed to the public, apparently to consider any matters the Committee thinks should be kept confidential.
Get your rest now. Enjoy the rest of summer. Or, if you can’t wait to start the fight, let the members of U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee know how you feel about pro-corporate, anti-equal pay for equal work, pro-life judges getting lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court.
Could we please call them anti-choice instead of pro-life?
I’m with you…I just posted that same sentiment on a different diary. To me pro-choice is basically pro-life. The whacko’s got to do the framing on this unfortunately and that’s what the public now believes and we seem to be stuck with.
What the fuck….a closed session? For one of the most important appointments that can be made concerning someone who will be passing judgment on issues brought before the court effecting the lives of everyone in the country.
I’m pissed already and I will send some emails.
I just watched “Hardball” and I was amazed to hear the usually patronizing and contemptible Christopher Hitchens say something I actually agreed with. (Previously, the only other thing he’s talked about since his “Trotskyite” days decades ago that I agreed with was his characterization of Mother Teresa as a fraud and a spiritual charlatan).
Anyway, he recounted a conversation between Senator Durbin and nominee Roberts in which Durbin, a fellow Catholic, asks him (Roberts) what he would do if a case came before him that required him to rule in a way that went against his religious principles. Roberts replied that he’d simply recuse himself. Hithchens declared quite pointedly that this answer by itself made it clear Roberts was conspicuously unqualified for the bench. In a culture that asserts the primacy of secular law as a foundation of it’s inclusionary democratic principles, how can anyone who elevates the arbitrary authority of their own religious law above that secular constitutional law possibly qualify for a judgeship?
I think this is an extremely important point, though one very hard to act on in this climate of political vehemence. How rational people could emphasize this point without being assaulted by the wingnuts for being anti-religion is a very tough question to answer.
Instead of getting some rest… You could always plow through some really boring PDF files full of Roberts info!
UMMM? Yay… lol
http://www.archives.gov/news/john-roberts/
The equal pay issue has the most potential for stirring popular interest in the hearings, in my view. Many women who would not call themselves feminists and might even be anti-choice won’t stand for being paid less. It’s utterly reactionary.
However, leading with that creates the possibility of putting it in context: the anti-environment opinions etc. that serve corporations over the public good, that harm people in the present and fracture the future.