SOTOMAYOR HEARING WORD COUNT SCORE - DAY 2

At the start of the Sotomayor Senate Confirmation Hearings I made a prediction that the Senators, so acutely aware of the cameras, would pose and vogue in the spotlight, taking away time for the nominee to speak.

I predicted we would hear far more words from the Senators than from Sotomayor.

Since blogger Andrew Malcolm over at the LA Times blog "Top of the Ticket" is doing the hard work of posting the transcripts everyday, I decided to count the words and see if my prediction was true.

Day One which consisting of Opening Statements proved me right.  See those numbers here.

Day Two, the start of questioning, again showed the Senators more interested in the sound of their own self-serving "monologues pretending to be questions" than the were hearing from Judge Sotomayor.

Here is the breakdown showing the number of words spoken by each Senator during their questioning of Sotomayor and the number of words Sotomayor used in answering their questions:

Senator Leahy:*        2284   Judge Sotomayor:    2172
Senator Sessions:*   2688     Judge Sotomayor:   1756
Senator Kohl:        1649    Judge Sotomayor:   2297
Senator Hatch:      2571    Judge Sotomayor:   1843
Senator Feinstein:  1695    Judge Sotomayor:   1797
Senator Grassley:   1292    Judge Sotomayor:   2392
Senator Feingold:   2625    Judge Sotomayor:   1577
Senator Kyl:          3404    Judge Sotomayor:   1369
Senator Schumer:  2539    Judge Sotomayor:    1708
Senator Graham:   2785    Judge Sotomayor:   1347
Senator Durbin:     2465    Judge Sotomayor:   1528

* Senators Leahy and Sessions, as the Master of Circucs Ceremonies, have also had plenty of other words to say at the hearing outside of their examination of Judge Sotomayor.

Here are the Day Two totals for words spoken:

Senators:                 27,907    

Judge Sotomayor:  19,786

Here are the spoken word totals for both days:

Senators: 

51,082

Judge Sotomayor:

20,728

The purpose of this hearing is to find out what we can about Judge Sotomayor, but the Senators are talking instead of her more than 70% of the time.

Good Grief.

Comments

[Neitzke]

Baed upon word count, only Senators Kohl, Feinstien and Grassley seem to think hearing from Sotomayor is more important. Overall the Republican Senators are the real 'gas-bags' averaging 2,548 words compared to the Democrats with 2,209. The Repubs need a healthy dose of humility seeing they do not represent the majority of Americans. Their constant focus on racism (especially the hypocrit, Sessions) looks foolish.

[Don]

Interesting and revealing analysis. The endless speechifying and grandstanding is annoying but not surprising. I appreciate tough questioning but the condescending tone taken by some (like Graham) is shameful. I think the line of questioning indicates that there is little in Sotomayor's judicial record to assail and thus questions about her ethnicity and gender-ethnicity have dominated the proceedings.
On a larger scale, it will be interested to see just how much further the GOP paints itself into a corner in regards to future elections.