Confirmation Hearings Confirm that Confirmation Hearings Must Go
.Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HA) official portrait 2013 (Public domain)
Like many politically inclined Americans, I watch them. And like many Americans I often wish they would just go away.
For decades, I’ve been a radio talk show host, trying to, well, be logical, and analyze politics in a thoughtful way.
But we radio hosts are often referred to as “blowhards.”
If you listen, especially to the conservative side of the dial, most radio hosts carefully prepare their commentaries, reading between lines, and making the complicated easy to understand. Many left-wing elected officials want to make us go away, even by removing AM radio from cars. Technology advances, and we will find new ways to remain.
Senate confirmation hearings, on the other hand should be abolished. As we’ve seen, the U.S. Senate is where the blowhards are.
AUDIO: Random Samplings of a Logical Mind
Sen. Mazie Hirono, a Democrat from Hawaii has become the Senate face of stupidity.
I’ll get to Hirono in a moment. But first, let’s establish that advice and consent of the U.S. Senate is important to ensure that nominees for the various positions are qualified. You know – like Kristy Noem is qualified to be Secretary of Homeland Defense. Or Pete Buttigieg is qualified to be Secretary of Transportation. (Cue the massive throat-clearing.)
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It’s also important to admit that high-level positions like cabinet secretaries and ambassadorships are routinely handed out as favors to supporters. That politics. But oughtn’t a nominee have at least some qualifications? And oughtn’t the Senate hearings be narrowly focused on the job a nominee might be able to do? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.
Video: Kinky Mazie seems deranged at the Hegseth hearings.
Blowhard Hirono seems little kinky when she wants to know all about the nominees’ sex lives. To Doug Burgum, nominee for Interior Secretary, she asked:
As part of my responsibilities to ensure the fitness of nominees before any of the committees on which I sit, I ask the following two initial questions. First is, since you became a legal adult, have you ever made unwanted requests for sexual favors or committed any verbal or physical harassment or assault of a sexual nature? Have you ever faced discipline or entered into a settlement related to this kind of conduct?
My thoughts turned to this: I wonder how many pompous members of the Senate have non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) related to extra-marital sexual activities? Remember, power is an aphrodisiac, and lots of pretty women hit on senators.
Video: Sen. Hirono reminds me of this Dion song.
I wonder, but I don’t know, because there are no confirmation hearings for hypocrites – I mean senators. (I was amused when Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma as asked his fellow senators about how many of them have ever showed up drunk for work.)
Video: Sen. Markwayne Mullin has a moment at the Hegseth hearings.
So, Burgum said “no” to all these idiotic questions. Gosh, I wonder what kind of Interior Secretary he’d make. Hirono asks similar question of Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for Defense Secretary. Hegseth’s past is certainly a bit juicier than Burgum’s, but again: what kind of Defense Secretary would Hegseth make?
The TV cameras are part of the problem, and, at the least, they ought to be removed.
I’m all for transparency. But these god-forsaken hearings have become a way for senators, who love to see their own images in the mirror, to get TV time and preen for the camera with trap questions that are not designed for answers. When it’s Democrat-on-Republican or Republican-on-Democrat, you may have noticed that the senator who’s asking the questions frames them as an attack, and has zero intention of allowing the nominee to answer.
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When the senator is of the same party as the nominee, the questions are generally friendly and supportive and the nominee is allowed to speak. In other words, a confirmation hearing is nothing but a clown show. Senators are the clowns.
It went downhill when the hearings began to be carried on live TV.
With the cameras pointed at them, senators enjoy taking advantage of national airtime to show their political base what a tough partisan they are. But they end up looking like fools.
Several past confirmation hearings stand out in my mind where U.S. senators made abject fools of themselves.
- Edward M. Kennedy’s grilling of Robert Bork, nominated by President Reagan for the Supreme Court.
- Joe Biden’s questioning in the “high-tech lynching” of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.
- All the Democrats who tried to smear Brett Kavanaugh on the occasion of his nomination to the Supreme Court.
Video: Kennedy blathers about “Robert Bork’s America.”
Video: Joe Biden grills Clarence Thomas.
Republicans have their moments, too. They were tough on Alejandro Mayorkas to be Biden’s Secretary of Homeland Security, and as the border crisis unfolded, the nation learned that he was not qualified for the job. Sen. Marsha Blackburn asked Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson to define a woman, and she could not, but she’s on the Supreme Court anyway.
The confirmation hearings need two major changes, and then they’d be more useful.
First, Washington politicians have shown us over and over that their brains cannot function when they are on camera. So, the live cameras have to go. The second change is that there must be a rule that the nominees have at least 60 seconds to answer any question. That’s reasonable, and would change the hearings from being in constant attack mode to, perhaps, being useful.
As things stand now, the televised confirmation hearings are useless, and the TV-watching public learned very little about, say, what Pete Hegseth would really do as Secretary of Defense. The one-on-one meetings in the senators’ offices are almost certainly a better way of grilling the nominees. It’s harder to be a rude asshole when you’re one-on-one behind closed doors. It’s much easier in a room crowded with onlookers, senate peers, and live TV cameras.
So, I say do away with confirmation hearings. Kill ‘em dead. They’re useless, except for providing the voting public with an opportunity to see what real jackasses are like. The live broadcasts would be a public service if members of the Senate would ask probing, thoughtful questions that are on topic and that would help us all to understand the qualifications and the mindset of the nominee – but what am I saying? I must be out of my mind!
For the most part, we’re talking adolescent jerks, otherwise known as members of the United States Senate.
Lynn Woolley is a Texas-based author, broadcaster, and songwriter. Follow his podcast at https://www.PlanetLogic.us. Check out his author’s page at https://www.Amazon.com/author/lynnwoolley.
Order books direct from Lynn at https://PlanetLogicPress.Square.Site. Email Lynn at lwoolley9189@gmail.com.
There are many probing, thoughtful questions asked in this book.
