I didn’t catch more than a couple hours, but I got a pretty good idea last week that John Roberts hearings were boring. Not only for the fact that his confirmation is a foregone conclusion and that he, predictably, refused to answer almost every question, but because the proceedings themselves were a total sham :

You would never know, if you sat through today’s proceedings, that there’s a war on. You would never know, if you were here, that the country is barely beginning to heal from the national wound that is Katrina. If you were a visiting alien, covering the Roberts confirmation, you could not be faulted for believing that the single biggest burning constitutional issue facing the federal judiciary is whether Ruth Bader Ginsburg answered substantive questions at her own hearings. More airtime goes to Ginsburg—she who “refused to answer nearly 60 questions,” according to Orrin Hatch, R-Utah—than to the extraordinary grant of executive-branch wartime powers in the 2005 opinion Roberts joined in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. In fact, I count exactly one senator (Dick Durbin, D-Ill.) who devotes more than a single sentence to the issue.

That’s because today’s hearings are not about the candidate. They are about the majesty and superiority of the Senate. Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., describes these proceedings as a “job interview with the American people.” But in what solar system would a four-day job interview include a solid day in which the interviewer talks about himself?
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It is an immutable rule of nature that every sadist needs a masochist, every leader needs a follower, and every addict needs an enabler. So, too, every egomaniac needs someone humble, and that’s why, in the end, these hearings are so perfectly matched. Roberts wants to say little and literally fade to black. The senators want to give speeches and seize the limelight. It’s a match made in heaven. It’s just the watching it that’s hell.

The Dems in the judiciary committee knew they didn’t stand a chance, so they took the opportunity to play up the theatrics. It’s not that they weren’t trying to get answers, it just that it all seemed sorta choreographed. Everybody knew the conclusion of this before the hearings even started.

Besides, the Roberts confirmation is a battle we lost last year. If having a wolf in sheep’s clothing put in charge of the legislative branch of the government is what it takes to get people to finally realize that their votes have consequences, then so be it. If he’s even half as moderate as he pretends to be, then I’d consider it a victory.