Politics & Power Quote by Fred Thompson

Fred Thompson is doing what Washington lifers do best: wrapping a blunt political point in the soft cloth of institutional memory. The halting cadence, the hedging ("something like that"), the vague timestamp, even the oddly passive "people didn't even come up before the Senate" all work as signals. He's not trying to deliver a clean history lesson; he's trying to win a procedural argument by making the present feel like a deviation from tradition.

The likely context is the modern spectacle of confirmation hearings, especially for judges. Thompson, a senator steeped in committee culture, invokes an earlier America where major appointments moved with less public theater and less senatorial interrogation. The subtext is clear: today's scrutiny is less noble guardianship than political performance, and maybe the Senate has inflated its own importance. By gesturing back to "about 1923", he borrows legitimacy from the idea of a simpler constitutional past, even if the date is fuzzy. That fuzziness is the tell. Precision would invite fact-checking; approximation invites assent.

There's also a quietly populist undertone: the system ran fine before senators started turning nominees into televised antagonists. It's an argument for restraint disguised as reminiscence. Thompson's line isn't persuasive because it's airtight; it's persuasive because it flatters the listener's suspicion that modern governance is mostly unnecessary pageantry, and it frames reforms as a return to normal rather than a power grab.