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, nominee for archivist of the United States, promising the HSGASC committee she would not declare the ERA amendment ratified. Ketanji Brown-Jackson telling the Judiciary Committee she would recuse herself from an affirmative action case involving Harvard. Way back in 2010, when I was an appropriations staffer, we got the director of an agency to promise us he’d commit to a telework policy.
This is an effective strategy for binding political actors to things. People don’t like going back on their word and, even if they would be willing to do so, it both raises the costs for them and empowers other actors back at their agencies to hold them to their word.
Blanche was put on the spot by both Senator Cornyn and Senator Tillis. Cornyn wanted Blanche to confirm the “anti-weaponization” settlement fund was no longer operable. Tillis wanted Blanche to commit to meeting with Epstein victims, which he has subsequently done.
Both Cornyn and Tillis were unusually specific in potentially withholding their votes in the committee over these promises. Which is crucial, since the balance of power on the committee is a single-vote.