This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 22, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Now that the hearings for Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch are winding down, what was left on the table?

How do you get at judicial philosophy without asking about cases?

Ilia Shapiro, editor of the Cato Institute's Supreme Court review, comments.

It seems like this happens every time.

Senators are trying to come up with these ways to quiz a prospective justice on the Supreme Court by getting their

opinions about issues that are definitely going to come to them at some point.

And what is the point of that?

Just trying to get them to, if they are confirmed,

recused themselves or something like that?

Trying to score political points of any kind,

because there are multiple audiences here.

There's the nominee asking the actual question directly.

There's the fellow party members, there's the opposition party members, and there's the general public, activists and general voters alike.

And different messages go to different of those audiences.

So some of these perhaps, the Democrats came into this hearing unsure of what exactly their strategy was going to be on Gorsuch.

He has a voluminous record, but generally uncontroversial.

I mean, sure, he's a Republican appoint appointee so there's not going to be radical communist

things in his record. He's definitely of one political stripe rather than another.

But as we saw the hearings go on, there were maybe two of his cases, three of the

2,700 on which the Democratic senators kept asking him about, the frozen trucker, the cancer

...