Judge Alito's Final Day of Questioning

This is a partial transcript of "Special Report With Brit Hume" from Jan. 12, 2006, that has been edited for clarity.

BRIT HUME, HOST: FOX News correspondent Megyn Kendall joins me once again in the studio to review today’s proceedings.

Megyn, I want to ask you about this issue of how forthcoming the judge was. In the complaints of Democrats afterwards, they are saying he gave a lot of responses, but he didn’t really give answers. You’ve had a chance to — you followed the whole thing. What do we know?

MEGYN KENDALL, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, the Democrats are none too happy about it. And you have the leadership saying he gave inadequate answers and didn’t answer a number of questions. At least one study has gone through and tried to count up the number of questions he was asked and answered versus other nominees, including our recently appointed and confirmed Chief Justice John Roberts.

Here is the deal. That study says that Judge Alito was asked a total of 759 questions. That he answered 716 of them. That he declined to answer 43 of them. Which would be six percent he declined to answer. Compare that with Chief Justice John Roberts. He was asked 574 questions. Answered 510, and declined to answer 64, which is 11 percent. So if you believe this study, Alito has answered more than Chief Justice Roberts.

HUME: Now I want to assume that when they say declined to answer, those are instances where he said this is a matter that might come before me, it’s a live issue in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence. I shouldn’t comment on that.

KENDALL: Right.

HUME: I think the Democrats were complaining about the fact that when he did answer, they thought his answers unresponsive. Now you and I both have listened to all of this. What is your impression about how willing he was to discuss the law when the questions were asked?

KENDALL: I actually personally thought he was forthcoming on a number of issues that I didn’t expect him to be. That’s not to say that he answered everything that they wanted answers to.

HUME: Or answered the way they wanted him to.

KENDALL: But the reason he was able to do that more so than other recent nominees is he has so many opinions that he has authored more than 300 cases and decided more than 300 cases. So he was able in virtually every question to refer to a case or at least what we saw with Alito was he would go back and explain his analysis of the issue, or he would at least say, I haven’t written on that issue. But here’s how I would analyze it.

And he would walk the Democrats through the steps. That is not what they wanted. They wanted to know the conclusion he would reach in the case. Not just how he would analyze it. His response was, I can’t get into specific predictions. And nor has any other nominee in the past.

HUME: Megyn Kendall, good to have you. Thank you very much.

KENDALL: My pleasure.

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