Invoking time limits for managing responses in US Senate Judiciary Committee lower court nomination hearings

Datos Bibliográficos

ID7750809
AutoresKristella Montiegel (0000-0002-2448-2951, University of Colorado, USA, autor de correspondencia)
Año2024
Volumen26
Número6
Páginas778-798
Fecha de publicación2024-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaDiscourse Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1461-4456 • E-ISSN: 1461-7080
EditorialSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/14614456241252597
OpenAlexW4402937392
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas37

This study uses Conversation Analysis to investigate an interactional practice in US Senate Judiciary Committee (SJC) lower court nomination hearings. Drawing from 13 hr and 36 min of data from Q&A rounds across 12 SJC hearings during 2020 and 2022, I document how senators’ invocations of the hearing’s time limits function as a resource for managing judicial nominees’ responses to their questions. I examine senators’ time invocations (TIs) in two main sequential areas: (1) When designing questions, and (2) when pursuing or challenging nominees’ responses. As a feature of question design, TIs help senators ‘move things along’ during their brief questioning time, as well as pin nominees to respond in ways preferable to the question. As a feature of pursuits or challenges, TIs help senators manage nominees’ off-topic, evasive, or unsound responses, thus ascribing different levels of accountability onto both nominees (for their inadequate responses to senators’ initial questions) and senators themselves (for the sequential and affiliative consequences associated with doing pursuing/challenging). Seven extracts are presented from a collection of 82 cases. Findings reveal how time limits can be leveraged by senators to advance various goals in this highly constrained and institutionalized context, including exhibiting and implicitly legitimizing partisan bias

Nomination · Political science · Conflict Management and Negotiation · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Law · Rhetoric and Communication Studies