How Supreme Court Nominations Became So Partisan

McConnell has done our nation untold damage by playing outside the rules to stack the Supreme Court. I wish I knew a legal way to counter his actions. Perhaps expanding the court after the Democrats win the 2020 election.

Need a degree from the IVY LEAGUE. Need to vote according to whatever think tank tells you. Be partisan.

This will always be the stolen seat. Political theivery

The false equivalency between Republicans and Democrats implied by this review is a joke. Republicans have been egregiously worse on this issue.

"Democracy depends on customs and norms as well as written rules" Yes. And McConnell broke one of the oldest norms. A sitting president nominates to the Supreme Court, the Senate then does its thing. It can vote a nominee down, but never to my knowledge has the Senate Majority Leader used his control to say no, we won't even meet the nominee, much less hold hearings or a vote. There was no legal requirement, nothing to stop such a thing from being done. A friend of mine likened the importance of governmental norms to a pickup basketball game. Everyone in the game knows the rules, but there is no referee there to enforce them. Games like that go on all the time. But if there are players who break the rules because there is nothing to stop them, the game falls apart. I would not be surprised, if it happens that Trump wins but the Democrats take the Senate, to see the Dems shut down ALL Trump nominations for the rest of his term. How could they cover themselves? McConnell claimed that voters should choose the new president so their voice could be heard. Well, if that was specious, how about something like this for specious? "Trump has already seated so many judges. We need to wait for another election so that we can maintain a balance that reflects the broad range of views of voters around the nation." I'm sure that some kind of nonsensical cover story can be concocted. It worked for McConnell. I fear that McConnell has set something like that in motion.

Who gets to sit on the Court? Evidence points to Catholics and Jews, especially the former.

The SCOTUS has not displayed non-partisanship for a long time. Party control of the Supreme Court has been a primary goal in elections of the legislative and administrative branches, leading to this violation of the constitutional provision for balance of power. A primary factor in maintaining this situation is the power given to the senate majority leader to determine agenda, including nominations of SCOTUS justices. Mitch McConnell has no intention of allowing any chance of placing anyone on the court other than one nominated by a Republican president. He has said as much. This is reprehensible and overt defiance of the constitution. Character is today hard to find in our government.

A glance at the educational histories of current Supreme Court justices would indicate that a law degree from a northeast Ivy League university [Harvard (4), Yale (4), or Columbia (1)] is the deciding factor in who gets appointed to the court. It is the same for most recent US presidents [Trump, Obama, Bush (both of them), and Clinton]. With 5,300 colleges and universities, and 237 law schools, in the USA, it seems strange that graduates from only two universities dominate two of the three branches of the US government.

I would be interested to know if Hulse regards the filibuster of Estrada as commensurate with the treatment of Garland, or if they do not have equal weight in his opinion.

So, for the foreseeable future we can expect that when one party controls the White House and the Senate it will ram through its ideological partisans, and when control is split no court vacancies will be filled? In light of the lifetime appointments to the bench, I guess it is only a matter of time until we see the appointment and confirmation of some 24 year old law school graduate with no experience to the federal courts!

The supreme court can no longer claim to be non-partisan and that is tragic. In its current form, it’s ideology reflects the extreme ideology of a minority of Americans. This is bad for the country and bad for democracy. Barack Obama was elected by nearby 65 million Americans. He had 11 months, nearly a quarter of his term to complete. He was thwarted by a man elected by 800,000 Kentuckians. How is this democracy? McConnell has no respect for Americans institutions anymore than Trump has. The more they lose public support, the more the GOP digs in. There can be no credibility in a democracy with out public support. Say what you will about Harry Reid, but at least his deeds were in support of the majority.

We all say we want a "balance" on SCOTUS but we don't develop any laws (much less constitutional amendments) creating and ensuring a more balanced court. Balance comes not from 9 justices from the center-left or center-right. True balance comes from the hearth of the competition of ideas from all quarters. Meaning we need the Bork's and the Douglas's to advocate ideas and challenges that only come from a broad awry of human experience. This game all the justice play about being the centrist is not only intellectually dishonest, but it deprives the court of arguing vigorously different ideas and notions of the laws and the constitution and putting them to the test. And has it dawned on us yet that SCOTUS is absolutely loaded with: (1) elites from east coast law schools-especially Harvard and Yale; and (2) big white collar corporate law firms? Enough already-history has proven that as a group they have no more wisdom than the rest of the men and women in the United States.

Now-Justice Kavanaugh was vetted 6 times during his government career and a 7th time after his hearings, and the FBI found no evidence of wrong-doing. Dr. Ford, who accused Mr. Kavanaugh of sexual assault, was unable to remember the day, month, year, city or house in which the alleged assault took place, nor how she got to or from her home to the location of the alleged assault. The witnesses she named as being present were, according to the FBI, unable to recall the alleged incident. Dr. Ford has had 35 years in which to bring criminal or civil complaints against Mr. Kavanaugh, but did not do so and has now said she does not plan to do so. She was the Dems' star witness, and her allegations were manifestly unsupportable because they were uncorroborated and lacked even rudimentary evidence. As a life-long Democrat I am disgusted with the so-called Democratic leaders and their blatantly phony attempt to derail Kavanaugh's confirmation and tarnish his reputation, an exercise in political theater rather than a genuine search for truth and justice. (An attempt at payback over Merrick Garland, I’d say.) We Democrats need to focus our efforts on finding a candidate who will appeal to a wide range of voters, including those who felt their needs and concerns were ignored in 2016. Failing to do this will ensure another four years of Trump as president.

We need to remove Trump from office for among many reasons allowing Trump to stack the supreme court with right wing judges will make the supreme court home to political hacks lacking national support.

It's important to remember that "left" and "right" are completely relative terms. When the Republicans finally implode (or die off) we might wind up with two new parties : The Democrats on the "right" and the Greens on the "left." Americans won't care. As long as there are two competing parties we'll be happy.

What may be worse to come will be our habitat. With our borders closed and the failure to do something positive with Nafta, there is not one place for the U.S. to expand now but its own interior. That means the destruction of what is our country's outdoor Fort Knox. Orrin Hatch managed to wrangle Bears Ears from us the same way McConnell did by block Garland. McConnell who doesn't remember Jim Crow surely does Bork. Need there be more said than the inability to defend ourselves without oil? The military needs it as much as they did when Monty beat out Rommel to the pump to win the 2nd World War in Europe only to become subservient to Middle Eastern powers. The worse will be a tightening of the noose there which Bolton and Pompeo believe they can loosen, but the stranglehold upon the citizenry by the Supreme Court managed by what should be collectively known now as the New United States, Citizens United powered by Libra. What McConnell is bringing us is bad water, bad air and nowhere to run.

Seems like we are inching closer day-by-day to being a banana republic where corrupt politicians and judiciary line up together to undermine the democracy and thwart the power of the people. I dread the day the conservative majority and Republican Senate will stand by when Trump after losing in 2020 will refuse to step down from power citing some phony voter fraud or other such nonsensical reasons.

Trump may be thrilling his fan base by packing the courts with very conservative judges, but he would not want to live under any of their rulings. If his daughters lived in one of those backward states with one abortion clinic and a 72 hour waiting period, he would make sure that she got an abortion if she wanted one without any hassle. He is not religiously observant and would complain loudly if some religious based rule prevented him from doing something he wanted like shopping on a Sunday morning. Even the religiously observant find no problem changing their attitudes about sex outside of marriage, divorce and someone who attends church only twice a year as they did to follow their god, Trump. Pence has no problem bending his beliefs to kiss Trump's feet. So even the religious right doesn't actually believe in all the conservative rulings, especially, when they want to choose a different path. This will come back to haunt them for years to come.

When has SCOTUS not been partisan/political? The best one can hope for, IMHO, is for SCOTUS to recognize some, if not most, of its most egregious legal sins and rectify them. Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education come to mind...

So sad that the Senate is nothing but a bunch of moral cowards with no concern about the American People. All they care about this their control. Obviously the judicial system needs to be reformed. Several good reforms I have read about: 1) 18 year terms. No need for life appointments. We don't need to be stuck with radical and/or incompetent judges for life. Rotate them out on a schedule that does not conform to the election cycle. And each President gets appointments due to: 2) Senate must have 60 or 2/3 vote to confirm. No exceptions. Stops the nonsense of wild swings to one end of the spectrum or the other. We get judges that actually represent the mindset of normal Americans, not out of touch extremists as have a majority on the Court now. 3) Senate must vote within 60 days. If no vote, the confirmation is automatic. The American People have no use for unethical and corrupt obstruction from extremist Senate "leadership." Each of these is commonsense and designed to make the American judicial system much better and force the Senate to do it's job without the corruption we see now from the ultra right wingers.

"But the Democrats were hardly in a position to complain." notes author Evan Thomas. But actually there are stark degrees of unfairness in the politics of the confirmation process. As Samantha Bee pointed out in her "Mitch McConnell: Dry Rot of Democracy" segment on "Full Frontal", before Obama there had been 68 nominees filibustered by the opposition, while in the short period of time McConnell led opposition to Obama's presidency, he connived 79 filibusters of the 44th President's nominees. And this doesn't even include Merrick Garland. As NYT's own Gail Collins pointed out last week, this man, "who has never gotten a vote outside the state of Kentucky", regularly blocks any notion of progress. It strikes me that Mitch McConnell wants to recreate the "Jim Crow paradise" that was the Kentucky of his youth in perpetuity, whether or not, young people have any voice in the outcome. People will still be suffering from the decisions being made by Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh well past mid-century. The "Grim Reaper" will still be reaping rewards from below.

I don't think Obama handled the Scalia replacement well. He should have anticipated the Republicans would block him. Instead of trying to find someone moderate and acceptable to Republicans, he should have picked a liberal black. That person's rejection would have helped bring out the black vote in November. Could have made the difference! (And I thought this at the time.)

When has SCOTUS not been partisan/political? The best one can hope for, IMHO, is for SCOTUS to recognize some, if not most, of its most egregious legal sins and rectify them. Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education come to mind...