If you were seated on the Senate Judiciary Committee and got the chance to ask one question, what would it be?
Here's mine:
During the 1990-1991 term in Payne v Tennessee, Justices O'Connor, Kennedy and Souter all voted to overturn direct Supreme Court precedents to allow victim impact testimony to come into trial. The next term, all three refused to do the same with regard to reproductive freedom rights in the Casey decision because, in part, 'for two decades of economic and social developments, people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.' They further wrote that about their nervousness in overturning precedent, stating that 'only the most convincing justification under accepted standards of precedent could suffice to demonstrate that a later decision overruling the first was anything but a surrender to political pressure and an unjustified repudiation of the principle on which the Court staked its authority in the first instance' and therefore 'subvert the Court's legitimacy beyond any serious question'.
In a sense, the same occurred in Dickerson v United States, in which the Court, led by Chief Justice Rehnquist, held that the Miranda decision had become such a part of our legal culture that it ought not be overturned.
Without getting into your personal beliefs on these issues, do you believe that certain precedents are less amenable to be overturned than others because of the public's reliance upon their rules, or do you believe that any case which this Court has decided wrongly ought to be reversed?