Law Professor Jeff Cooper over at Cooped Up says that Utah Senator Orrin Hatch is being more than a tad disingenuous in his statement to Congress earlier this week on judicial nominations.

Prof. Cooper says:

"Sen. Hatch decries the consideration of ideology in the Senate Judiciary Committee's evaluation of judicial nominations. In his statement, Sen. Hatch asserts that during the Clinton administration he never voted against a judicial nominee because of the nominee's ideology. This statement, while perhaps technically true, scores major points for gall. The reason Sen. Hatch never voted against nominees based on ideology is that, as then-chair of the Judiciary Committee, he refused to schedule confirmation hearings for an enormous number of Clinton's nominees. Rather than voting based on ideology, in other words, he manipulated the Senate's rules to kill nominations without votes, based apparently on ideology (Sen. Hatch could not seriously contend that all, or even many, of the nominations for which he refused to hold hearings involved nominees who were "unqualified" based on their credentials and judicious character). Far from being thoughtful commentary, Sen. Hatch's statement reveals him once again to be a hypocrite of the first order. "