– What should the proper role of the Senate Judiciary Committee be in Supreme Court
confirmations? What kind of questions should be asked and which ones should be avoided?
What kind of investigation should be conducted? Should nominees be required to testify in public?
Since Supreme Court Justices enjoy lifetime tenures in order to maintain judicial impartiality, the Senatorial confirmation process is the only time where potential Supreme Court Justices are reviewed by a democratically elected governing body. This process is interesting in two aspects. Firstly, this is an instance where a supposedly neutral and impartial potential Supreme Court Justice is exposed to the increasing partisan and divisive political process of the 21st century, and their individual political and ideological biases may be brought into question by members of the Senate, not to mention the private affairs of their individual lives outside of being a legal professional. One cannot help but wonder whether these political leanings and biases outside of court may truly influence the view of a Supreme Court Justice in the judicial process, and if they do, then how they should be properly accounted for in a government branch that was supposed to interpret the law from a completely unbiased standpoint. And secondly, there is the question of whether members of Senate are truly the correct individuals to be questioning potential Supreme Court Justices and determining their suitability to head the legal system of our nation, when members of Senate themselves may either have no formal legal background, or have heavily partisan agendas which may influence their decision-making process. In the paper, I plan to examine how the confirmation process have changed in our partisan and divisive era, how multimedia and information infrastructures based on the internet changed the public perception on such events, and perhaps even offer some potential alternatives to how the confirmation process can be handled more maturely and less divisively, without fundamentally changing the processes mandated by the Constitution.