A number of interesting books about the judicial selection process have come out in recent years. This is the first in an occasional series briefly describing some of them.

We begin with the rigorously even-handed Confirmation Wars: Preserving Independent Courts in Angry Times, by Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. It was originally published in 2006, but a new edition is coming out soon. At only 131 pages, it's a quick read.

(Disclosure: Wittes is a friend of mine.)

As a Washington Post editorial writer from 1997 to 2006, Wittes criticized Senate Republicans for stalling and savaging well-qualified Clinton nominees, and later Senate Democrats for stalling and savaging well-qualified Bush nominees. Confirmation Wars distills the lessons of this experience and sheds new light on many decades of prior history.

In recent years, Wittes asserts, the confirmation process "has changed fundamentally and for the worse," degraded by "activists and senators who willingly trumpet gross distortions of the nominee's record, misleading insinuations about his or her character, and sometimes even outright lies." These partisans see "the task of judging merely as an exercise of raw political power," and make barely a pretense that judges should be impartial.

Wittes also explains how we have come to this "embarrassing spectacle," with vicious attack ads demonizing nominees and sometimes circus-like hearings that yield "minimal information."

The modern practice of nominees testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee began in earnest after the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Southern racists -- determined to smoke out and block desegregation-minded nominees if they could -- demanded that they appear before the committee.

The escalating partisan warfare since then represents "an institutional reaction on the part of the legislative branch to the growth of judicial power." What began with Brown continued with more questionable judicial interventions "in a breathtaking array of democratic decisions," as judges increasingly asserted "the power to regulate questions of social policy at the core of Americans' sense of autonomy and identity."

Wittes' prescriptions for change are more controversial than his diagnoses. One is that the Senate -- at least when not controlled by the president's political party -- demand pre-nomination consulting and even "refuse to confirm a nominee not selected from a preapproved list of its devising."

Another Wittes proposal is to return to pre-Brown practice by eliminating or at least limiting live testimony by nominee. Senators use their questions, he says, "either to wring concessions from would-be justices or to tar them as unworthy." And the necessarily evasive answers reveal "virtually nothing" about what kind of judge or justice a nominee would be.

But senators have grown fond of using nominees as props while sounding off for the cameras. And the media love the spectacle. So the show will go on.