Graves Confirmation Hearing was a Non-Event
Will Bardwell attended Justice Graves' Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday and wrote this account for the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal. The hearing opened with softballs from Senator Al Franken. Franken reminded Graves that “you're good enough, you're smart enough, and dog-gone it, people like you.”
Then it was time for the Republican attack. Except the Republicans implemented a French battle plan and questioned Graves about something they couldn't beat him on: the death penalty. Bardwell reports:
But fears raised earlier in the week about a real attack on Graves proved unfounded.
After writing this post about Eugene Volokh's blog raising questions about Justice Graves, I received an email from Mr. Volokh that explained how he knew about the Mississippi Supreme Court decisions that he wrote about. The email explained:
Dear Mr. Thomas: I read with interest your post that mentioned my post about Justice Graves, but wanted to make one small factual point – though I do often learn about stories because readers send me links, in this case (as I recall) I learned about the Wilkerson and Osborne opinions myself, when they were decided. The Wilkerson case was reported in Westlaw Bulletin, and I have a daily WestClip query on that; the Osborne case, I think, likely came up in a daily WestClip query I have for new First Amendment cases. My main scholarly field is First Amendment law, so I track free speech cases closely.
Whoops, forgot to make explicit one thing: I am certain that no-one contacted me about the cases after, or even not long before, the Graves nomination; rather, it was the Graves nomination that reminded me about the cases that I had read earlier.
Volokh's explanation makes sense, particularly given this sentence that was in the first paragraph of his post:
And while I know only one small corner of Justice Graves’ work, I hope the Committee asks him a question about this corner.
By the way, I apologized to Volokh for misreading the tea leaves and he was very gracious. His blog has a national following that will include me in the future.
Re: Volokh, that's a completely disingenuous response that continues to ignore the enormous factual distinction between Osborne III and Wilkerson, et al. And Volokh, of all people, is smart enough to know better. It was a hit job, pure and simple. Whether it was fed to him or he generated it himself is of little consequence to me.