But if Kagan's job is to get confirmed, the task of progressive members of the Senate Judiciary Committee is to reverse the effects of years of conservative propagandizing over the stakes in our debates about the nation's highest court.

They will be pushing the narrative away from the hot-button social issues that have been a distraction from the main game: the use of the Supreme Court as a redoubt against progressive legislation, the right of plaintiffs to call corporations to account before juries, and the ability of the political system to protect itself against corruption.

Leading this charge will be two recently elected Democratic senators who are free of the constraints imposed by the controversies of the past, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Al Franken of Minnesota.

SNIP

This time, Whitehouse told me he plans to focus on how conservative courts have limited the rights of plaintiffs to challenge corporations before juries by restricting the right to sue and on the evidence that can be brought into play.

"Corporations hate juries," Whitehouse said. "It's the one part of government you can't buy." He will link this argument with a challenge to the Supreme Court's appalling Citizens United decision, which gives corporations virtually unlimited rights to spend money to influence elections. Invoking the baseball umpire metaphor made popular by Roberts, Whitehouse observed that "corporations have a different strike zone in the Supreme Court than regular people."

Franken previewed his own approach earlier this month in a powerful speech to the American Constitution Society that has already made conservatives unhappy. Franken argued that the right has dominated the judicial debate by suggesting that "the Court's rulings don't matter to ordinary people" through a focus on cases involving late-term abortion, flag-burning and pornography.

The time has come, Franken said in an interview, for progressives to recognize that Roe v. Wade has distracted attention from what is now at the heart of the judicial controversy: the ability of individuals to assert their rights against corporations.

"If you use a credit card, if you work, if you drink water, you're affected by the court," he said. "Roe is important, but there's this whole other area we weren't talking about."

I missed his "performance" in the Committee this morning, but I did catch a little of his appearance with another low-wattage colleague - John Cornyn - before I had to hit the "mute" button.

On the flip side, there was an awful lot of gushing praise and over-the-top rhapsodizing about Kagan from the Dems on the Committee, and what particularly grated was the suggestion by a couple - Feinstein was one - that there was almost no need for a hearing at all, that's how much of a done-deal, no-brainer, the nomination is.