Thread by @ChadPergram

1) What is past is prologue.
 
The explosive confirmation hearing for Clarence Thomas in the fall of 1991 set the table for the Kavanaugh experience. The hyper-combustible Kavanaugh confirmation process propelled the confirmation hearings into the stratosphere

2) That in turn sets the tables for hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett. Days before an election. The High Court is poised to swing well to the conservative side of the ledger.

3) The controversy of a breakneck confirmation process, augmented by how Senate Republicans dissed President Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court in 2016, Merrick Garland.

4) The words “confirmation hearing” are nowhere in the U.S. Constitution.
 
Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution says the President has the power to nominate Supreme Court Justices. The Senate then provides “Advice and Consent.”

5) There’s nothing about individual meetings with senators. Stacks of paperwork. FBI background checks. Just the Senate to vote, up or down. Yea or nay.

6) Supreme Court confirmation hearings never existed until 1916. The Senate heard from witnesses both for and against Justice Louis Brandeis. Brandeis didn’t attend the hearing.

7) No Supreme Court nominee ever talked with senators about their confirmation until Justice Harlan Fiske Stone did so in 1925. There were questions about Stone’s ties to Wall Street.

8) Felix Frankfurter was the first justice to attend their own confirmation hearing in 1939. Frankfurter attended – but did not speak.
 
The current model for modern confirmation hearings came in 1955 for Justice John Marshall Harlan.

9) But TV – and controversy – presented an altogether different factor for confirmation hearings. Such was the case with the 1991 hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. An epic battle as law professor Anita Hill lodged sexual harassment charges against Thomas.

10) This was really the first time the nation wrestled with the idea of sexual harassment in the workplace. There was discussion of porn stars and private parts as TV networks took the hearings live – through the weekend!

11) CBS even debated whether to stick with the hearings or show the baseball playoffs one night. And none of the white male senators looked good – especially up against an African American man and an African American woman.

12) Thomas declared that the hearing was “a high-tech lynching.” The chair of the hearings? Joe Biden, then a senator from Delaware.

13) The Kavanaugh hearings weren’t much better. Women lining the walkways of the Hart Senate Office Building, dressed as though they just came from wardrobe in The Handmaid’s Tale.

14) These hearings are made for television. They contain drama. Verbal broadsides. Soliloquies. In both the Thomas and Kavanaugh confirmation processes, everyone thought the hearings were over.

15) And then, like any gripping movie or book, a late plot twist emerged: accusations from Hill and Ford.
 
One can only anticipate what to expect in Barrett’s hearings in such a supercharged atmosphere in the age of coronavirus.

16) But sometimes on Capitol Hill, when things are so amped up, senators actually dial it down a notch. Sometimes a hearing like this can plod along. Especially if it’s partially virtual. It’s a paradox, to be sure.

17) One thing for sure: everyone will be watching. And these hearings could present a final, galvanizing moment, before the election.