Alito hearings more of a farce than you thought

The New Republic points out something I haven't heard mentioned before-- not only did they carefully prep the nominee before the hearings, but they have a GOP fixer sitting right behind him during the hearings!

Cracking down on lobbyists is a hot issue in Washington these days, but it hasn't quite made it to the Senate Judiciary Committee. On day one of his confirmation hearing, Samuel Alito introduced America to his fine-looking family, spread across a row behind his right shoulder. But that tall, chinless man who could be frequently glimpsed over Alito's other shoulder wasn't some Alito brother-in-law. It was Ed Gillespie, K Street's most connected post-Abramoff Republican and part of the White House's large team of Alito handlers and spinners shepherding him through the Senate.

While Alito's jargon-laden monotone seemed to have an anesthetizing effect on his critics--which explained much of his success this week--Gillespie and the White House's rapid-response operation also helped. As Democrats tried to pin down Alito on abortion, criticized him for an alleged conflict of interest, and nailed him for his executive branch sycophancy, Gillespie and his team--BlackBerries always crackling--huddled frequently with GOP senators and their aides, crafting real-time responses.

The result was that, after three days of hearings, Alito and his defenders on the Committee had successfully deflected the shotgun spray of attacks fired by Democrats. They defanged the major ethics issue--the accusation that, as a judge, Alito should have recused himself from a case involving Vanguard, a company in which he had investments--by simply pointing to the numerous legal ethicists who have declared the charge bunk. Alito's explanation of why he once argued that a police warrant empowered officers to search a ten-year-old girl at the scene of a drug bust didn't sound as extreme as it had when liberal critics first presented it. His narrow reading of the Commerce Clause, which led him to write a controversial dissent proclaiming that Congress can't regulate machine guns, hasn't turned into much of a rallying cry for a filibuster, either. But, despite the success of the K Street-led spin operation and Alito's bland geekiness, there were a few morsels in Alito's hearing transcript that Democrats could turn into filibuster bait.

(Emphasis mine.) The rest of the article is about how the case for a filibuster might be made, and it's recommended reading. The hearings have been such a sham that little is likely to come of them.