Would-be showdown lost audience

WASHINGTON -- Orrin Hatch has a new camera phone. And apparently the senior senator from Utah has become really bored.

On Wednesday, the third day of Senate Judiciary Committee hearings to consider the confirmation of a chief justice to the highest court in the land, Hatch shared his new toy with the senior senator from Iowa, Charles E. Grassley.

Yesterday morning, Hatch -- sitting next to the chairman's seat he once occupied -- twirled back and forth, snapping pictures of the hearing room.

Meanwhile, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, senior senator of Vermont and the committee's ranking Democrat, took his seat on the dais 45 minutes late Wednesday. He had decided to keep his doctor's appointment. Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, also a former chair of the panel, was a no-show most of yesterday morning.

Hearings once billed as the political showdown of the decade rapidly lost audience share as the week dragged on. With Roberts coolly parrying even the most barbed questioning from Democrats, no surprise revelation emerged.

By yesterday, the last day of the proceedings, live TV coverage had nearly evaporated. Instead, cable news channels focused on other fare. Even C-SPAN's coverage was mostly relegated to its digital system, C-SPAN 3, while its two broadcast outlets were occupied with gavel to gavel coverage of House and Senate chambers. ''It's a commitment we made when we went on the air," Steve Scully, senior executive producer and political director, said of the decision to televise the two chambers instead of the committee proceedings.

Still, Scully insisted the Roberts hearings were ''great political theater," adding that C-SPAN rebroadcast the session every night and will rerun the hearings this weekend.

'Ginsburg standard'
Republicans are invoking a new ''Ginsburg standard" to persuade Democratic senators to vote for Roberts.

In the run-up to this week's confirmation hearings, pro-Roberts forces repeatedly cited Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a Clinton appointee, as an example of a nominee who refused to answer questions on legal issues that might come before the court. Democrats rejected that premise -- provoking a math war in which both sides offered competing numbers on how many questions Ginsburg answered during her 1993 confirmation hearings.

Now Republicans are holding up Ginsburg's bipartisan confirmation victory as a challenge to Democrats.

Noting the Democrats say they are impressed by Roberts's intellect and experience but unsure of his ''heart" on social matters, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, yesterday issued a broadside against Ginsburg as a ''bleeding heart" who nevertheless earned the votes of nearly all Senate Republicans.

Ginsburg was confirmed on a 96-3 Senate vote. Then-Senate Republican leader Robert Dole said he didn't agree with all of her views but extolled Clinton's choice as ''a respected judge . . . who has the temperament that one would want and expect in a Supreme Court nominee."

But Jesse Helms of North Carolina -- who joined with fellow Republicans Bob Smith of New Hampshire and Don Nickles of Oklahoma in opposing Ginsburg -- accused her of holding an ''outrageously simplistic and callous position on abortion" and wanting to ''uphold the homosexual agenda."

A second opinion
It's not easy being a senator without a law degree tasked with grilling a potential chief justice. Fourteen of the 18 panel members are attorneys.

''I'm not a lawyer, and I don't really know how to ask this question, but I'll try," Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said yesterday.

But an astute nonlawyer like Senator Tom Coburn, a Bible-quoting family doctor, figured out how to assert his own credentials. Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, was the senator who choked up with tears on the first day of the hearings as he called for ''less divisiveness, less finger-pointing." Before that, he was best known in Washington for sponsoring sex-education classes for congressional staffers, warning them of venereal disease.

On Wednesday, Coburn brought that same medical sensibility to his questioning of Roberts. ''I've tried to use my medical skills of observations of body language," Coburn told the witness. ''And I will tell you that I am very pleased, in my observational capabilities as a physician, to know that your answers have been honest and forthright as I watch the rest of your body respond to the stress that you are under."

Maximum impact
While most liberal activists groups declared their opposition to Roberts in the weeks leading up to the hearings, a handful held out until this week, hoping for maximum impact as they continued a drumbeat calling on the White House to release more documents.

Planned Parenthood sent protesters to Capitol Hill, but billed its Wednesday press conference as a ''major announcement." Likewise, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights waited until testimony yesterday by its executive director, Wade Henderson, to come down squarely against the nominee.

And Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, who shared many concerns about Roberts despite the judge's ''winsome personality," released his verdict just one hour after questioning of the nominee ended. ''Now is not the time for a chief justice who is bent on turning back the progress we have made in moving America forward," wrote Dean.

Rick Klein of the Globe staff contributed to this report.