Megan McArdle on the ongoing senate confirmation hearings for Trump nominees:
We might have hoped to get some sense of where things are headed from Wednesday’s Senate hearing on Price’s confirmation. We might also have hoped to get a bow-wrapped Lexus in the driveway this Christmas, but most of us probably didn’t.
Senate confirmation hearings are always more ritual than substance. The party of the nominee asks penetrating questions such as “Isn’t it true, Madam, that you once rescued an entire family of orphans from a burning building?”, with frequent pauses to thank the nominee for being there, and perhaps compliment them on their taste in confirmation hearing attire (confident, but understated, you understand). The opposition ranges from feigning outrage about things they have done themselves, to petulant whines about how much time they are being given to probe the vital matter of the parking ticket the nominee received in 1984 for depositing their car in a snowplow zone.
But the ritual is necessary. It allows us to maintain the polite fiction that our legislators actually care what the nominee thinks, rather than the partisan impact of confirming them. It can inform the public about issues with the nominee’s record that they should care about, even if they don’t. And occasionally, mostly by accident, actual new information does get tossed out.
