Questions

Red State's got a Ginsburg-Roberts comparison that doesn't quite mean what they think it means:

Ginsburg: 17 Hours of Questioning
Breyer: 18 Hours of Questioning
Rehnquist (for Chief Justice): 12 Hours of Questioning
Roberts: 22 Hours of Questioning

Ginsburg: 216 Questions
Roberts: 510 Questions

They deploy this to prove that John Roberts has answered so many questions that unless senators start relying on Trivial Pursuit cards, they can't possibly think of anything more to ask. But that's not what the stats prove. If you do the math, Ginsburg answered 12.17 questions an hour, Roberts, in contrast, sped through 23.18. So senators asked Roberts almost twice as many questions per hour than they asked Ginsburg. Why?

Any guesses?

Ginsburg answered the questions. And answering questions bogs down a Senators' ability to rapidly ask them. Roberts, in contrast, didn't answer most of the questions, preferring instead to bat them back for being too specific/vague/likely/unlikely/person/professional and forcing his interrogators to try and get the same info through different rhetorical permutation. This doesn't show Roberts was forthcoming, it shows he was frustrating. So thanks for this one, Red State -- I had a feeling Ginsburg was more open, but I'd no idea the numbers proved the difference so stark.