Meh. The job of the Senate is, as the representatives of the people, to consent or not to the president’s nominee. They can do this on any criteria they want. Part of the purpose of the current public debate is to ajudicate, as a community, what that criteria should be.
It’s not a legal standard. One plausible standard is “we shouldn’t worry about the teenage sins of our SCOTUS nominees.” Another is “people with credible accusations of violent behavior shouldn’t be on the court.” A third is the one you suggest—that the evidence matters.
But the idea that these aren’t open to debate—or that the Senate shouldn’t debate them—strikes me as odd. People keep calling this a circus, but I think that’s because they preference their own ends over the adjudication of the conflict. This has to be messy. It’s politics.
But that’s not a bad thing. The choices we make as a people are important, and reflect how we see ourselves as a people. We all have conflicting values that can never be reconciled completely. But that’s why the public debate matters.
