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Due to the nature of congressional partisanship, a nominee for the Supreme Court of the United States will only proceed to having a hearing if the votes are already there to confirm them. This creates a process in which the nominee is effectively little more than a prop in what is supposed to be their own job interview, but is actually simply an opportunity for members of the Senate to signal their virtue to the activist voters they rely upon to remain in office.

And there is nothing wrong with activist voters. The problem, to the degree that one considers it a problem, lies with the indifferent voters whose interest in the election goes little farther than the partisan identity of a given candidate. Activist voters can be relied upon to vote for the policies, or at least the attitudes, they want to see from government, and will withhold votes from a candidate who is too moderate for their tastes. But less engaged voters will sit out the primary contests, and if a general election candidate is more extreme than they might like, well, they're still better than whomever is running on other parties' tickets.

For several years now it's been more or less clear that the Supreme Court of the United States is not there to interpret the Constitution. Rather, it's there to go along with whatever interpretation that members of Congress have decided is accurate. Such is the prestige of the role that many judges are willing to overlook that (and perhaps they even believe that they aren't intended to be partisan hacks), but I wonder if that will hold up indefinitely.

But the pull to the extremes that activist voters have induced in members of Congress has come to mean that voting for a candidate advanced the other party is quickly becoming a messy form of political suicide, thus rendering the process of hearings moot. Why bother to debate when the votes are already graven in stone before the first words are spoken?