The Circus

These SCOTUS Confirmation hearings are more like show trials.

The Circus

It was three-ring affair as the Senate Judiciary Committee harangued  Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The unrelenting—and frankly off-the-rails—questioning of the judge focused on her sentencing of child porn defendants. It must be said that none of the Republican questioners, primarily Josh Hawley (R-Insurrection), Lindsey Graham (R-Fainting Couch), and Ted Cruz (R-Cancun), actually believe that the judge is either soft on crime or child porn. This was a made-for-tv fundraising event, pure and simple.

It is fair to think of these three as content providers for right-wing media. Their disrespectful and unserious lines of questioning, not to mention the badgering and interrupting, will be fodder for the talk radio and right-wing cable channels for the next week, then they’ll be slickly edited into fundraising and campaign ads that will show the antagonists as righteous warriors in their culture wars, and if she’s shown at all (she is incidental in this Kabuki play), Ketanji Brown Jackson’s role will be portrayed as an enabler of sex offenders who is a bumbling pawn in the larger Q-Anon fever dream that casts the Democratic Party hierarchy as too busy to govern because their time is taken up operating a child sex trafficking ring.

From the Washington Post, “A Public Religion Research Institute poll found that 23 percent of Republicans believe that ‘the US government, media, and Wall Street are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.’ A poll the year before found that fully 50 percent of Trump supporters believed that ‘top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings.’”

The ever-interrupting, ever-hypocritical Cruz demanded to see sealed court documents of the cases in question, a request he knows would violate defendants’ rights and victims’ privacy. It is just a show-boating nonstarter by the Senate’s most despised member. The committee’s chairman, Dick Durbin (D-Exasperation) was unable to keep Cruz in compliance with the rules of the committee, let alone the rules of decency. Durbin tried (feebly, honestly) to get Cruz to stop interrupting the witness, but Cruz was unrelenting. He threatened to stop a committee vote, but the ranking Republican, Charles Grassley (R-Methuselah), dismissed the notion.

There will inevitably be comparisons with Democrats’ treatment of Justices Brett Cavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, some deserved, most specious, but nonetheless, our polarized system now consistently generates more heat than light. There are no winners here, least of all the country.

One thing you can count on, is that this is the Broadway equivalent of a show opening in Hartford. You work the kinks out before you trip the light on the Great White Way. Rest assured that the greatest hits (and I mean that literally) like “soft on crime” will all find their way into the ads coming in this Fall’s midterm elections.

While the point-scoring exercise went on, one thing was crystal clear: the media loves a fight, and if there isn’t a good enough one, they’ll amp up the breathlessness of their coverage to make it seem worse than it is. After all, their goal is not to enhance a fair process of hearings, it is to capture and hold eyeballs as long as possible. That this represents a revenue opportunity for news organizations should be lost on no one. Still, make no mistake, the hearings were unnecessarily contentious and had a racial undertone, but that was to be expected, given where we are.

It shouldn’t be surprising that the media blows ill-mannered questioning out of proportion because it suits their business plans. It wasn’t anything we haven’t seen before. Just a lot of political theatre intended for their TV ads and email fundraisers. The oft-reasonable Ben Sasse (R-Common Sense) said it best: “I think we should recognize that the jack-assery we often see around here is partly because of people mugging for short-term camera opportunities.”

In a bygone era, bosses like William S. Paley, the founder of CBS, built a “Chinese Wall” around their news departments. Paley held sales and marketing at bay and demanded the news division remain independent from the financial prospects of the network.

It seems appropriate that we should now take a moment to mourn the days when news was news, entertainment was entertainment, and the twain never met.

Their current marriage, the one that has given us the hideous, even dangerous, world of “infotainment” where the lines are so successfully blurred that it’s become hard to tell one from the other, benefits no one—especially the American people—except the networks’ shareholders.

Despicable behavior and grandstanding sate the hungry media. The vicious circle is a profit center. The Dems insult nominee Cavanaugh, so the Republicans retaliate with pointlessly cruel questions for Jackson.

Last week, the circus came to town. No one enjoyed the show.

©2022 Jon Sinton