"And in that confirmation process, I sat for 17 hours in front of a senate judiciary committee"
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Seventeen hours is doing a lot of work here: not as a boast, but as a quiet indictment of what judicial legitimacy has been made to endure. Stephen Breyer, the consummate institutionalist, frames the confirmation ritual in the plainest procedural language - "that confirmation process", "sat", "committee" - and then drops the number like a weight. The sentence performs Breyer's signature style: restraint as rhetoric. He doesn't call it theater, doesn't name the partisan incentives, doesn't even say "interrogated". He just sits there, grammatically and politically, letting the duration imply the ordeal.
The intent is twofold. First, it's an appeal to credibility: I went through the furnace, I paid the dues, I respect the process because I survived it. Second, it's a subtle defense of the judiciary's posture of neutrality. By describing himself as stationary - "sat" - he casts the nominee not as a combatant but as an object under scrutiny, someone acted upon by democratic institutions rather than someone seeking power.
The subtext, though, is that the process isn't really about illumination. A 17-hour hearing signals a system optimized for performance: senators fishing for clips, nominees trained to say almost nothing, and the public offered stamina as a proxy for seriousness. Breyer's choice to emphasize time over substance hints at what confirmation has become in the modern era: not a seminar on constitutional method, but a televised stress test meant to ratify the institution while quietly draining it of candor.
The intent is twofold. First, it's an appeal to credibility: I went through the furnace, I paid the dues, I respect the process because I survived it. Second, it's a subtle defense of the judiciary's posture of neutrality. By describing himself as stationary - "sat" - he casts the nominee not as a combatant but as an object under scrutiny, someone acted upon by democratic institutions rather than someone seeking power.
The subtext, though, is that the process isn't really about illumination. A 17-hour hearing signals a system optimized for performance: senators fishing for clips, nominees trained to say almost nothing, and the public offered stamina as a proxy for seriousness. Breyer's choice to emphasize time over substance hints at what confirmation has become in the modern era: not a seminar on constitutional method, but a televised stress test meant to ratify the institution while quietly draining it of candor.
Quote Details
| Topic | Perseverance |
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