My doubts that Senate Democrats would be more responsible at today’s hearing than they have been in the past appear to have been vindicated, at least if this early report e-mailed to me by an observer of the hearing (someone I have found to be thoroughly reliable) is accurate:
The Democrats, not surprisingly, failed to engage in a meaningful debate and resorted to bullying the minority witnesses who offered factual evidence that the Supreme Court is not biased in favor of business. At one point, Chairman Leahy accused Robert Alt, Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, of sarcasm and abruptly cut off his opening statement. Senator Whitehouse similarly interrupted Alt, refusing to let Alt answer his question. But perhaps most outrageous was Senator Franken’s dismissal of Andrew Pincus, who argued the Concepcion case on behalf of AT&T, as not qualified to speak on the hearing’s topics because partners at his law firm, Mayer Brown LLP, make more than a million dollars a year. I assume Franken was unaware that Pincus was an official in the Clinton Administration, serving as General Counsel of the Commerce Department under Bill Daley.