Sen. Susan Collins is right: The Supreme Court confirmation process is broken. It has been broken for some time.

The judicial branch was set up by the Founding Fathers to be one of the three pillars of the checks-and-balances system to ensure that no one branch would become too powerful.

Unfortunately, the judicial branch has become enslaved to the political ideology of the majority party of the Senate. Sen. Collins correctly points out that the confirmation process is held “to examine the experience, qualifications and integrity of the nominee” and “not to assess whether a nominee reflects the ideology of an individual senator or would rule exactly as an individual senator would want.”

If the main criterion for selecting a Supreme Court justice is that their political ideology matches that of the Senate’s majority party, then senators should just place an advertisement in the media that lists how they would like their putative nominee to vote on the various legal issues and make their selection from the pool applicants.

When deciding whether to vote for a nominee, what senators should be concerned about is whether the nominee would correctly identify the relevant legal principles, apply these principles to the facts of the case and then make a decision based on logic to reach their final outcome.

When it comes time to vote on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination, senators would do well to heed Collins’ advice: “I will not agree with every vote that she casts as a justice. That alone, however, is not disqualifying.”

Samuel Rosenthal
Portland

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