Politics! In the United States Senate!

The fa href="http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=07amp;year=2009amp;base_name=the_vote_count_fetish"etish about the number of no votes/a registered in successful Supreme Court nominations is one of the strangest Villager obsessions. br /br /I do think that the apparent underlying ideology -- that confirmation hearings for life-tenured appointments to an independent branch should focus on narrow qualifications and perhaps personal trivia as opposed to substantive constitutional issues -- is what explains Matt's a href="http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/07/revisiting-the-judges-of-yore-with-republican-senators.php"query/a:br /br /blockquoteI still in an honest-to-God, no-joking way don’t understand why conservatives who want to vote “no” don’t just say something normal like “I thought Justice Souter voted the wrong way on a number of important cases, I think Judge Sotomayor is likely to vote in a similar way to Souter; I would prefer a judge who votes like Justice Roberts or Justice Scalia; therefore, I’ll vote no.” That’s not insane, it’s not offensive, it’s not foolish, it’s not bizarre—it’s something you’d have to respect./blockquoteNot only does the idea that Senators should be unable to vote for nominees based on ideological disagreement even when justices are span style="font-style: italic;"chosen/span for obviously ideological reasons make no sense on the merits, it creates a perverse normative order in which bad-faith race-baiting is considered acceptable but straightforward disagreement on matters of constitutional principle is not.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7163938-5786833804651504842?l=lefarkins.blogspot.com'//div