Based on an analysis of transcripts, the sheer number of comments uttered by senators and the nominee during hearings has quickly grown by an order of magnitude, from a few hundred at most to a thousand at least. (That extra long bar was the Bork hearing, of course, which cracked 3,500 comments.)
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And the expansion didn’t come just in the number of comments but also in their breadth. The number of unique issues addressed at the hearings — coded in this data, for example, as “civil rights,” “judicial philosophy,” “environment” and “defense” — has been steadily rising, from two or three to more than a dozen.
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