Roberts Hearings Telling and Strange

For four days this week, John Roberts sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee and declined — gracefully, eruditely, and at some length — to tell the senators much of anything they did not already know.

He was magnificent at it. Without notes, he cited 200-year-old cases, distinguished precedents with the ease of a man ordering lunch, and charmed senators of both parties into nominating him for chief justice all over again. It was, by every theatrical measure, a triumph.

And it told the country almost nothing about how John Roberts would actually judge.

The ritual has a name — the confirmation hearing — but it has become theater without information. Nominees learn, from Robert Bork's fate onward, that the safest answer to every question is a seminar on why the question cannot be answered. Senators learn that the safest response to a seminar is outrage for the cameras and a party-line vote behind closed doors.

Roberts is hardly the first to master the dodge. Ruth Bader Ginsburg set the standard in 1993 with what she called the rule of no hints, no forecasts, no previews. The difference is that Roberts would be the youngest chief justice in two centuries, with a plausible 30 years ahead of him. The Senate is being asked to confirm a cipher to a lifetime seat.

The fix is not to force nominees to prejudge cases — that would be worse. It is to stop pretending the hearing is the vetting. The vetting is the record: Roberts' briefs as a Reagan-era lawyer, his two years on the D.C. Circuit, the memos the White House has declined to release.

By that record, he is a conservative of unusual skill and, so far, unusual caution. The Senate will confirm him. It would be nice if, somewhere in the four days, it had also learned something.