On Wednesday, Glenn Greenwald posted a key part of the transcript of Justice Samuel Alito’s 2006 confirmation hearing, which suggests that, just three and a half years ago, Republicans thought empathy was a pretty righteous quality in a Supreme Court nominee. Well, we’ve dug up the footage of that portion of the hearing and, as it turns out, he sells the empathy pretty well.
Now either Alito believed what he told the Judiciary Committee, or he believed that the then-Republican led panel wanted to hear that sentiment. But either way it makes the recent Republican insistence that Supreme Court nominees sit bereft of empathy on the bench a little bit hard to believe.
Earlier today, Greg Sargent dug up an old interview in Ladies Home Journal in which Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (a now-retired Reagan nominee) suggested that her experience as a woman impacted her jurisprudence.
