I agree with respect to the theater of the absurd that confirmation hearings have turned into. Might as well just do all appointments during Recess.

1) Stevens apparently felt strongly enough that the Heller majority was wrong that he could not follow the precedent. But most of his dissent had nothing to do with guns, but rather the standard for substantive due process, which he thinks the conservatives have pinched beyond recognition. Note that he did not join Breyer’s dissent, nor did Breyer (w/ RBG and SMS) join Stevens’s.

2) My thoughts are that the Sotomayor hearings represented the bottoming out of the post-Bork confirmation hearings. Her handlers did not want a fight, especially one with ugly racial over(and under)tones, so they just had her be as robotic as possible–even if that meant agreeing to respect gun rights. She did what she had to do in today’s confirmation hearing climate, and that’s a tragedy both for her and for our politics.

But this game can be played anywhere: Roberts’s commitment to stare decisis, however earnestly spoken, cannot survive Citizens United, even with his concurrence explaining himself. In fact, I anticipate that his CU concurrence will be used time and again by both sides to overturn precedents either finds politically distasteful. It will allow Roberts to overturn Roe, even though he called it a “super-duper precedent” at his hearings; it will allow Soto and Kagan to overturn Heller and McD if the libs get a majority in the next decade or two.

Also any thoughts on Sotomayor’s 180 degree flip flop from her confirmation testimony regarding RKBA?