Senator Kennedy took the scary position that it was just 
    and appropriate for the Congress to extract by coercion 
    the private, internal records of a political advocacy 
    group just because it was considering the nomination of a 
    person who had once been a member of that organization.

    To understand how weird this is, consider the following
    "thought experiment": If the next Democratic SCOTUS 
    nominee once belonged to the American Civil Liberties 
    Union(as Ruth Bader Ginsburg actually did) and, say, Sam 
    Brownback proposed issuing a subpoena for the "records" 
    of the ACLU to help him "understand" the nominee's 
    testimony, what do you imagine the reaction of the 
    mainstream media might be? The implications of Senator 
    Kennedy's demand for freedom of speech and association 
    are appalling. Where's the outrage?