The hubris of the drafters.

I'm not going to watch the Amy Coney Barrett hearings.  At least I don't intend to. But I did catch part of their openings last night.

These consisted of alternating Senators making long statements.  Once again, I'm stunned by how far from court proceedings these things are allowed to go.  If this was a court type proceeding, there'd be two, and no more than two openings.  The fact that there are any openings at all means that there are already two sides as arguments are pitched at third parties, not at yourself.  In a hearing, that shouldn't even be the case, other than a short introductory statement about what the proceedings are about.

Democrats are focusing on the Affordable Healthcare Act and appear to be convinced that Barrett is going to vote to hold it unconstitutional.  In reality,  nobody has the slightest idea what Barrett will do on whatever the question is, and I don't know what it is.  It has something to do with the individual mandate, but that's all I know.

Democrats have lashed onto this and are really pitching sympathetic arguments on it, as in "she's going to cruelly push people out of insurance".  The epitome, in the brief time I watched, was a really poorly done argument by Senator Patrick Leahy.

Leahy symbolizes, in my mind, what's wrong with American politics right now to start with.  He's been in the US Senate since 1974, longer than most Americans have been alive. And that brings up my next point.

In pitching a maudlin argument to the committee, via the web (and I don't blame him for that, given COVID), replete with photographs of people with medical tragedies, including one posing with Smokey The Bear (or rather a person, obviously, in a Smokey costume) he inarticulately and shakily droned on about how Barrett was going to take away their insurance.

Well, if the law is unconstitutional, and I don't know that it is (under the Commerce Clause I can't see how it could be), that would be Congress' fault, not Barrett's.

In other words, if you do a bad job of drafting instructions so that they can't be followed, that's your fault, not the person who declares they can't be followed.

Granted, I understand this is politics, and I understand that the Republicans amended the AHCA to take out the financial penalties for failing to have insurance, which somehow, although I don't see how, gives rise to this argument, but the problem still exists.  Arguing to a judge that the judge should preserve what Congress failed to is a lot like a child demanding that his parents go to school to fix his bad grade.

Or its like making the Supreme Court a Super Legislature, which Senator Mike Crapo pointed out in his much more balanced opening.