The Part We Missed

A quote attributed to G. K. Chesterton has him answering a letter from the editors of The Times of London about what is wrong with the world with the following statement: "Dear Sir, I am." It's certainly one of those that sounds right, even if there's no documentation to back it up. In either event, Chesterton did write a book called What's Wrong With the World that could be said to have included him as a culprit, even if not stated that way in so many words.

The saying comes to mind when listening to Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse's opening statements from Wedesday's hearings on the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the United States Supreme Court. Sasse offers a defense of Kavanaugh's qualifications and then adds some thoughts on why the hearings are such a ridiculous circus (aside from the fact that Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris are two twerps who want to be president more than they want to do their jobs as senators and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is just a twerp). What's the major problem with Congressional hearings on judges, Sasse asks? Well, a la Chesterton, he says the major problem is Congress. Not because it contains so many people who couldn't get real jobs if their parents owned a company -- that's the voters' fault for electing them.

But because a cowardly and lazy Congress has abdicated its job of making legislation, handing it over to the executive branch and its faceless unelected bureaucrats and the courts and their law-creating instead of law-interpreting rulings.

Sasse's statement, which makes up about 90% of the sensible words said Wednesday, was lost in the midst of the craven pandering from Harris, the utterly bone-headed self-aggrandizement of Booker and the disassociation from reality of Whitehouse. It's too bad, because the second half of his words would be exactly right even if he was talking about a judge he opposed.

Of course, if a legislative branch operated like it was supposed to it wouldn't have any appeal to folks like that, since it would require a sense of shame and the ability to work something other than a mouth.