The confirmation process for Supreme Court justices has deteriorated because the process has become about politics, legal experts say. 

“I think unfortunately we’ve reached a new low,” Carrie Severino, chief counsel and policy director for the Judicial Crisis Network, said Monday as part of a “Preserve the Constitution” panel discussion at The Heritage Foundation. Part of the blame for a more political process can be laid on judges who are “acting like politicians” instead of turning a blind eye to politics, Severino said at the event held the day before Constitution Day.

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The landscape for judicial confirmations would look different, she said, if judges kept their politics out of the equation.  “If you had justices who were trying to have an objective approach with the law rather than having a judicial philosophy that almost invites one’s own personal philosophy in, you wouldn’t have to have this process,” she said of hotly contested Senate confirmations for judges.

Also on the panel were John Yoo, a former deputy assistant U.S. attorney general who is the Emanuel S. Heller professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, and Thomas Jipping, deputy director of Heritage’s Edwin Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation. John Malcolm, vice president of Heritage’s Institute for Constitutional Government, acted as moderator.

Heritage’s Jipping said the left’s attacks on the personal beliefs of some judges when it comes to faith and other convictions are also inappropriate.

“Why would [Sen.] Dianne Feinstein care about what Amy Barrett’s religious beliefs are?” Jipping asked,” adding:

Why would Sen. [Richard] Blumenthal attack a nominee because he belongs to the Knights of Columbus? … For that matter, why would senators care why a judicial nominee wrote something in their school newspaper 25 years ago? It’s because the left believes judges decide cases based on their personal views. So they want to know what those personal views are, and these are all bits and pieces that they say that they believe will tell them kind of what’s in the judge’s or the nominee’s heart.

Jipping added that the left relies on personal attacks on conservative nominees to fill vacancies because the left sees it as a way to produce a legacy on the courts.

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“The real issue, and the issue that must be debated, are differences in the power of judges and how judges go about approaching what they do,” Jipping said.

“And the reason that one side uses tactics like that, and tried to destroy people personally, is because the kind of judiciary they want is an all-powerful judiciary where their entire agenda is in that basket; they’ll do anything to try to achieve it.”

(Excerpt from The Daily Signal. Article by Rachel del Guidice.)