"We have to hit him harder."

Said a Democratic senator to E.J. Dionne during the afternoon break of the first day of questioning at the Alito hearings:

The senator was expressing frustration over a process that doesn't work.

Define "work." You mean, doesn't permit you to defeat the President's nominee as long as he is very well qualified and can give reasonably substantial answers to all the many lines of searching inquiry the opposition party has been able to develop?

It turns out that, especially when their party controls the process, Supreme Court nominees can avoid answering any question they don't want to answer. Senators make the process worse with meandering soliloquies. But when the questioning gets pointed, the opposition is immediately accused of scurrilous smears. The result: an exchange of tens of thousands of words signifying, in so many cases, nothing -- as long as the nominee has the discipline to say nothing, over and over and over.

Define "nothing." You mean everything that isn't a pledge to decide cases the way you'd like or to confess to bias and bigotry?

Democrats seem to be wary of mounting a filibuster. What they should insist upon, to use a euphemism Alito might appreciate, is an extended debate in which his evasions will be made perfectly clear to the public. If moderate senators want to vote for a justice highly likely to move the Supreme Court to the right, they can. But their electorates should know that's exactly what they're doing.

Oh yes, extended debate, for the benefit of the public. Because we haven't heard enough verbiage from the Democratic Senators yet.