All Things Considered host Roberrt Siegel interviewed Iowa (R) Senator Charles Grassley about the first day of the Sotomayor hearings. Grassley may have been expecting the usual softball treatment where Republicans get to mouth the party's planned talking points of the day while interviewers sit back and let them ramble. Siegel wasn't having it.
The keyword is empathy, as Siegel noted. While Democrats made much of Sotomayor's experience and qualifications, the GOP was talking up empathy as somehow disqualifying Sotomayor from proper judicial impartiality. Siegel started off with a sound clip of Grassley complaining that Obama had made empathy a criterion for the bench; he then followed up by asking Grassley to amplify that, which he did.
Then Siegel cold-cocked him!
You will get not a hint of that from the transcript at the NPR website; it just restates Grassley's talking points. Listen to the audio clip (starting at 1:41) to get the real interview. (More)
After Grassley complained that judging based on empathy is just legislating from the bench, Siegel did the unthinkable: He asked a question that actually challenged that thesis!
"What do we want? Callous judges who just disregard the impact of the law on people?"
From listening to Grassley's reply it seems pretty clear that he was staggered by this, and began flailing around rhetorically to try to respond and get back on that message that Sotomayor will be an activist judge legislating from the bench. Siegel counterpunched by quoting from Samuel Alito's hearing where Alito said:
"When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background, or because of religion or because of gender, and I do take that in to account."
Siegel then pointed out to Grassley by his standard, that should have disqualified Alito. Grassley, already getting punch drunk by this point started saying something about a judge needing
"to look at the four corners of the law and make decisions based on what that law says. Now if it isn't clear, now of course they've got a right to go beyond just the words of the law, to court debates and of other courts and the history behind the bill."
About this point Siegel pointed out that Grassley still voted to confirm Alito.
Trying to recover, Grassley began blathering about how today was mostly positive for Sotomayor, but they were just trying to make a point about the 'proper' role of a judge. When Grassley started talking about how he'd voted for every justice except Stevens, who'd already been on the court before he became a senator, that's when Siegel really lowered the boom with some Stevens personal history that goes right to the center of the GOP hypocrisy on empathy.
I'm not going to transcribe it here; GO LISTEN TO THE AUDIO CLIP! It's that good. (You can download the audio clip if you like - it's about 7 minutes long and it's a keeper.)
If only the press would work this hard all the time, asking real questions and doing their homework ahead of time, this country would be in a lot better shape.
Kudos to Robert Siegel for doing such a great job. You might want to tell NPR that - and ask why the transcript at the NPR website gives the complete opposite impression of the interview. This is not the first time I've looked at an NPR transcript and wondered if it had anything to do with what I heard on the radio.
UPDATE: The Rec List? It must be for using "Pwned" in the title ;-)
Seriously, thanks - and several observations in response to several common threads in the discussion.
On the transcript versus summary issue, as of this update the NPR website still has the same description of the interview up that sparked my comment. I see that NPR does offer transcripts - for a price - and hopefully when one for this story is available, it will be full and complete. I may have been confused because when I hear NPR say that transcripts are available on the web. my reaction was to consider what I found there what NPR meant by transcript. My bad if that's the case.
Nonetheless....
What does appear is almost totally misleading. The summary reads as though it could have come straight from the GOP. Nowhere does it suggest that Siegel did anything more than sit there while Grassley handed down wisdom from above. There's a concept called lying by omission - this seems to fit the bill. And that was my point about NPR freaking. For most people who didn't hear the story on the radio and don't or can't listen to the audio clip, that summary is the version they'll take away.
Second, several commenters have raised an important point. Why are we still hearing largely Republican voices on Sotomayor? Are there no Democrats, no Liberals, no Progressives with opinions worth hearing? How is it the GOP still seems to have editorial control over the media narrative? It's hard to appreciate what's missing from the debate when it's not allowed in the door.
Finally, if you liked what Siegel did, let NPR know. And, let them know what you didn't like, too. The time of progressives being seldom seen and never heard are over. If Siegel can get good buzz just by asking logical questions and doing his homework, maybe the rest of the NPR crew will pick up on that too. Can't hurt to try.