Ben Sasse’s ‘Tell It Like It Is’ Moment at Kavanaugh Confirmation Hearing By Chris Queen
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The Nebraska senator’s statement may wind up being the most blistering moment of the hearings.
As the hearings to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court generated a partisan circus — complete with protesters in Handmaid’s Tale garb — one man stood above the fray to deliver a splash of cold water to the face of Congress. That man was Ben Sasse.
Senator Sasse (R-Neb.) made one of the most impassioned statements of his career on Tuesday. In ten minutes, he held forth on what is wrong with the politicization of the Supreme Court nomination process.
The Washington Post‘s Amber Phillips broke Sasse’s speech down into four bullet points:
1. Congress is set up to be the most political branch. “This is supposed to be the institution dedicated to political fights,” Sasse said.
2.But in the name of politics, lawmakers have decided to keep their jobs rather than take tough votes. “Most people here want their jobs more than they really want to do legislative work, and so they punt their legislative work to the next branch,” Sasse said.
3. Because Congress often lets the executive branch write rules, and Americans aren’t sure who in the government bureaucracy to talk to, that leaves Americans with no other place than the courts to turn to express their frustration with policies. And the Supreme Court, with its nine visible members, is a convenient outlet. Sasse: “This transfer of power means people yearn for a place where politics can be done, and when we don’t do a lot of big political debate here, people transfer it to the Supreme Court. And that’s why the Supreme Court is increasingly a substitute political battleground for America.”
4. Sasse’s final point is one you can probably guess is coming by now: That this process needs to change. If Congress did more legislating, these Supreme Court nomination battles would get less political, he argues: “If we see lots and lots of protests in front of the Supreme Court, that’s a pretty good barometer of the fact that our republic isn’t healthy. They shouldn’t be protesting in front of the Supreme Court, they should be protesting in front of this body.”
Clearly, in the senator’s eyes, Congress isn’t doing what the public has elected them to do, and this failure of the body to do its job has led directly to the divided, heated hearings we see every time a potential Supreme Court justice is up for confirmation these days. CONTINUE AT SITE
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