Do Supreme Court nominations matter? Not even Alito bit

I have absolutely no interest in the Samuel Alito nomination hearings, and two great blog posts succinctly capture why:

Butler Shaffer on LRC:

There is a pretense in the hearing process for each nominee that we are going to discover his or her philosophic dispositions. We already know what those are: each is insistent upon advancing their careers by interpreting the meaning of constitutional or statutory language so as to serve the interests of the political establishment. Otherwise, they would not have percolated themselves up through a system that regards them as "safe" trustees of power. Their positions on abortion, or capital punishment, or flag-burning, provide little more than peripheral entertainment; distractions from the Supreme Court's primary role: to rationalize the exercise of state power.

Brad Spangler:

Constitutionalism and limited government have had their chance and failed. You can never really go home again. I maintain that the way forward, to correct the shortcomings of the vision of the US Founders while adhering to their ideals, is anarchy.

Anyone who has made acommodations with power and the powerful sufficient to allow for their nomination by a sitting president is not likely to be the sort of crusader against them that might rescue the system from its own self-destructive march toward ever greater tyranny and resulting instability.

Exactly. The system is so hopelessly corrupt that the composition of the Court matters only to the statists who worship it. When the problem is institutional, it doesn't matter who gets nominated or confirmed -- Harriet Miers would have been no "better" or "worse" than Sam Alito in any meaningful sense. The political establishment loves to squabble over the Court and its members, pumping it with an inflated sense of importance, because both sides agree that political power must be exercised -- the fight is over whose vision of statism will prevail. So you can see why none of this political theatre matters from the anarchist perspective.

Let's face it -- the system of checks and balances long ago metamorphosed into a rubber stamp. That's what happens when the government is permitted to decide the boundaries of its own power.