Confirmation Hearing
A confirmation hearing is a proceeding in which a Senate committee questions a presidential nominee for an office that requires Senate confirmation. Senators may ask about the nominee's experience, qualifications, views, and approach to the responsibilities of the position. A hearing is one step in the process; the Senate later decides whether to confirm.
Before the full Senate votes on a presidential nominee, the relevant committee — Judiciary for judges, Foreign Relations for ambassadors and the Secretary of State, and so on — holds a confirmation hearing where the nominee answers questions under oath, and the committee ultimately votes on whether to send the nomination to the floor with a favorable, unfavorable, or no recommendation. For the Supreme Court specifically, these hearings have become intensely scrutinized televised events, though nominees have developed a well-known practice of declining to answer questions about how they might rule on future cases.
That evasive pattern has a name: the “Ginsburg Rule,” after Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s own 1993 confirmation hearing, in which she declined to preview her views on specific legal questions likely to come before the Court, reasoning that doing so would improperly signal how she’d rule before actually hearing a case’s arguments. Nearly every subsequent Supreme Court nominee from both parties has followed a similar approach, frustrating senators on both sides who want more direct answers about a nominee’s judicial philosophy.
Common misconception: people often expect a confirmation hearing to function like a genuine debate where the nominee reveals detailed opinions on hot-button legal issues. In practice, nominees are extensively coached to give carefully non-committal answers on anything resembling a case likely to reach the Court, making the hearings often more revealing about a nominee’s composure and legal reasoning style than about their actual views on contested questions.