- Such is the level of partisan rancor at Senate Judiciary Committee meetings that some staff aides recently suggested that the Department of Homeland Security screen senators for weapons and sharp objects before they enter the hearing room.
- If trading insults is the rule on Capitol Hill these days, and it appears to be, the Judiciary Committee offers an especially vivid example, rivaling the House Ways and Means Committee, another increasingly nasty forum.
The ritual courtesies, niceties like "I want to say to my good friend from the State of X," uttered as the prelude to a verbal assault, can no longer conceal the genuine anger and sometimes even loathing with which some Democrats and Republicans regard each other.
Nor is there any sign that either side wishes to yield even a small bit, the first step to compromise and the breaking of a deadlock.
In the Judiciary Committee, the bitterness springs partly from an understanding that the federal appeals courts are a principal battlefront in the culture wars. As judges increasingly decide some of the most heated social issues in the nation, the issue of who gets to be a federal judge has increased in importance.
- The latest candidate to provoke this debate was Janice Rogers Brown, a justice of the California Supreme Court who has been nominated to a seat on the influential appeals court in Washington. Justice Brown, an African-American, has given some fiery conservative speeches and written sharply worded judicial opinions.
She insisted at her hearing last week that she was not, as her critics have asserted, "out of the mainstream" of legal philosophy. Ever since the 1987 confirmation hearing of Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court, the issue of whether a nominee is in the legal mainstream has been a prime debating point.
But Justice Brown has questioned the validity of the so-called incorporation doctrine, under which the essential elements of the Bill of Rights apply to the states. The incorporation doctrine is nowadays as well settled as any judicial principle and is a cornerstone of modern judicial decision making.