Quote of the day: on the party of NO

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing:

[Lindsey] Graham asked them how many votes they received at their confirmations.
"Ninety-eight," Scalia said.
"Eighty-seven," Breyer followed.
With that, Graham had made his point to his colleagues.

Interesting, right?  Justice Scalia who gets on most Democrats' nerves every single time was practically unanimously confirmed.  Then later during Clinton's tenure, when obstructionism seriously began, Breyer's confirmation generated a lot more no votes.  And now, we are pathetically down to party-line voting, to oppose for the sake of opposing.

The context for Graham to ask that question was this:

One of the sole Republicans to have voted in favor of both Sotomayor and Kagan, Graham looked directly into C-Span's cameras on Wednesday to tell those watching that nominations are a "political decision" and, accordingly, the Senate should accept the consequences of elections and vote for competent judges even if their philosophies don't line up with those of the senator's political party.

 
Good luck with getting that idea across to the Grand Obstructionists Party.

Dahlia Lithwick writes that the joint appearance by Breyer and Scalia is all the more the evidence that the US Supreme Court proceedings ought to be televised:

the two justices killed before the Judiciary Committee, raising the question anew: Why don’t they do this every week? Why are they hiding this great light under a marble bushel? A new Gallup poll shows that the Supreme Court’s approval rating is at a nearly historic low—only 46 percent of respondents approve of the high court, while 40 percent disapprove. That’s a 15-point drop from the recent high of 61 percent in 2009. Politico notes that the lowest approval recorded by Gallup was in 2005, at 42 percent.

On the one hand, the justices of the court shouldn’t care what the polls say. On the other, they really do. And Wednesday’s outing—proving that even ideologically opposed justices can riff about the Constitution, agree about more than they disagree, and call each other “Nino” and “Steve”—can only reassure the American public that there is nothing fearsome, elitist, or threatening about the courts.