Outwitted and Outclassed

AT about 6:00 P.M. on Wednesday, September 14, in approximately the 19th hour of Supreme Court chief-justice nominee John Roberts’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, after each senator had had the opportunity to question Roberts at great length, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein looked at Roberts and said, earnestly, “I want to go back to the ‘hapless toad.’ It still bothers me.”

If a single question could be said to have drained whatever energy and interest remained among a dwindling number of senators, reporters, and spectators in the Hart Building hearing room-well, that was it. Feinstein was referring to a phrase Roberts had used in an oft-quoted 2003 decision concerning the arroyo toad, a California species that was not, in Roberts’s view, covered by the Endangered Species Act. But by that time, there was only one truly hapless party in the Roberts hearings, and that was Feinstein and her fellow Democrats.

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Byron York

Byron York is a former White House correspondent for National Review.

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AT about 6:00 P.M. on Wednesday, September 14, in approximately the 19th hour of Supreme Court chief-justice nominee John Roberts’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, after each senator had had the opportunity to question Roberts at great length, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein looked at Roberts and said, earnestly, “I want to go back to the ‘hapless toad.’ It still bothers me.”

If a single question could be said to have drained whatever energy and interest remained among a dwindling number of senators, reporters, and spectators in the Hart Building hearing room-well, that was it. Feinstein was referring to a phrase Roberts had used in an oft-quoted 2003 decision concerning the arroyo toad, a California species that was not, in Roberts’s view, covered by the Endangered Species Act. But by that time, there was only one truly hapless party in the Roberts hearings, and that was Feinstein and her fellow Democrats.