Confirmation hearing leverage

Watching the Todd Blanche confirmation hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee for his nomination to Attorney General, we are seeing some unusually explicit examples of one of my favorite reasons to hold a confirmation hearing: to get nominees to promise you things in public. You don’t hold hearings to gather information. If you want information, you can get it much easier via phone call and private meetings. If you can’t get it through them, you aren’t getting it via a public hearing. The point of a public hearing is the public nature of it. For me, oversight/confirmation hearings are for four things: Member emoting on issues, yelling at people in public, getting people to promise you things in public, and building a public record, which is just Hill-speak for trying to influence future politics. I detailed all of this in an old Substack post. Once you internalize the idea that hearings are useful for getting people to promise you stuff, you see it all the time. Colleen Shogan,…