The WaPo columnist writes, “I’ve been frustrated for years over nominees’ understandable reluctance to answer any but the most banal questions in any but the most banal way, and by the Senate’s much less understandable acquiescence to this confirmation stonewalling. . . . [I]t is ridiculous to think that asking nominees to describe their overall judicial philosophies or even their general approach to particular legal issues would compromise their independence or impartiality.”

I argued similarly when John Roberts was nominated:

[I]t would be inappropriate for Roberts to say how he would vote in a pending case — say, the case involving Oregon’s assisted-suicide law, which is on the Supreme Court’s docket in the next term. No one disputes that. The question, however, is whether an informal prohibition on expressing an opinion on particular cases should be extended to cover the general issues at stake in those cases. Should Roberts be expected to say, if asked, whether he believes the Constitution protects a right to assisted suicide?
It is certainly possible that allowing such questions, and expecting nominees to give answers to them, would cause confirmation hearings to degenerate into campaigns to get nominees to follow particular party lines. A nominee who pledged always to vote for pro-lifers, or always to vote for racial preferences, to get confirmed would be undermining the rule of law and the impartiality of the judiciary. . . .
For presidents and senators to refuse to ask Supreme Court nominees pointed questions about how they would use their powers — and to treat it as permissible for the nominees to duck such questions — is to weaken further an already weak set of checks and balances on the Court. . . .
So while there are risks to allowing presidents and senators to elicit from nominees too many clues about how they would rule, there are risks to not allowing them to do so. Those latter risks grow in importance as judges assume more power. We may, then, be dealing with some outdated norms.