Biden suggests straight vote 'if the judges aren’t going to talk'

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

NBC News and news services
Updated: 9:53 a.m. ET Jan. 12, 2006

WASHINGTON - As questioning of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito resumed Thursday following some raw emotion a day earlier — two senators in a testy exchange and Alito’s wife bursting into tears — a senior Senate Democrat told NBC News that the hearings serve no purpose and should be replaced with a straight up or down vote on the nominee.

“The system's kind of broken,” Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., told NBC’s “Today” show. He defended the type of questions that apparently unnerved Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann Bomgardner, who briefly left the hearings in tears shortly after Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham told Alito, “I am sorry that you’ve had to go through this. I am sorry that your family has had to sit here and listen to this.”

Americans should know how a nominee interprets the Constitution on key social views, but since nominees refuse to discuss their interpretations, citing the possibility they’d have to rule on them in the future, the hearings serve no real purpose, Biden said.

“The alternative” to hearings, he said, “is just to vote on the Senate floor, just go to the Senate floor and debate the nominee’s statements. ... instead of this game where a nominee sits there” and won't disclose his or her views. “If the judges aren’t going to talk about it than we should just go to a vote,” he added.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10818490/