Asking public questions at hearings is something close to a revolutionary act in New York's State Legislature.
Hagel, in hearings, offered something in the tens of millions (which is likely low); how that spending would fit into the sequester is not clear.
The idea that a good Supreme Court justice merely applies the law, as Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Sonia Sotomayor both asserted at their confirmation hearings, misses something important about the nature of the Supreme Court's work, Ms. Kagan suggested back in 1995, proposing a thought experiment.
There was a point in time when Congressional hearings accomplished something.
It is small wonder then that Rep. Michael Honda, himself a former Japanese-American internee, this week denounced King's hearings as something "sinister," designed "to stoke the fires of anti-Muslim prejudice and Islamophobia".
Actually, I was thinking about it the other day: I think the Anita Hill hearings snapped something in me, just watching this woman who was clearly so smart and had no reason to be lying, being grilled by these largely male senators.
Mine arrived in 1953 when the Post assigned my mother to draw the Army-McCarthy hearings, which -- something new under the sun -- were to be televised live by ABC.
There is not a committee chairman in the House of Representatives who isn't planning hearings of outrage about something — except maybe the poor woman John Boehner appointed to run the committee in charge of housekeeping.
In the third piece, Adam Gopnik described how the hearings were, for him, "something of a conversion experience," rendering the abstract arguments of the feminists in his life suddenly "concrete and particular".
After all, 59% of voters in an election-day exit poll by Voter News Service said "Clinton was not a factor" in their vote, 61% said they disapproved "of the way the Republicans in Congress have handled the Clinton-Lewinsky matter", and 57% said Congress should "drop" its impeachment hearings.But that is something more easily wished by the public than achieved by Congress.
