Justices Appointment in the United States
Supreme Court of the United States: Appointment and Confirmation
Introduction to Justices Appointment
Justices of the Supreme Court are appointed by the president and must be confirmed by a majority vote in the Senate. The president usually chooses the nominees carefully to minimize the possibility that the justice will veer far from the administration’s own agenda after he or she is confirmed. The president must also be careful to select a nominee with strong chances for Senate confirmation, otherwise the administration may lose prestige in a bruising confirmation battle with the Senate. Presidents often try to secure Senate support by balancing the Court’s geographic and regional background. Many 20th-century presidents have also tried to balance the Court’s religious, racial, ethnic, and gender makeup.
Only Protestants served on the Court until 1836, when the Senate confirmed President Andrew Jackson’s nomination of Roger B. Taney, a Catholic. Since then there has almost always been a Catholic on the Court. Louis D. Brandeis was the first Jewish justice in 1916. Civil rights lawyer Thurgood D. Marshall became the first African American justice in 1967. President Ronald Reagan appointed the first woman, Sandra Day O’Connor, in 1981. The first Italian American, Antonin Scalia, came to the Court in 1986. In the late 1990s, the Court consisted of four Protestants, three Catholics, and two Jews; seven men, one of whom was black, and two women. Two were from Arizona (Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Sandra Day O’Connor), and one each were from California (Anthony M. Kennedy), the District of Columbia (Scalia), Georgia (Clarence Thomas), Illinois (John Paul Stevens), Massachusetts (Stephen G. Breyer), New Hampshire (David H. Souter), and New York (Ruth Bader Ginsburg).
On average, the Senate rejects about 20 percent of all nominees to the Supreme Court. The president’s choice must face questioning by the Senate Judiciary Committee, which then makes a recommendation to the Senate as a whole. The Senate began asking nominees to appear before the Judiciary Committee only in 1925, when President Calvin Coolidge’s nomination of Harlan Fiske Stone was in jeopardy. Felix Frankfurter, a nominee of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1939. Such appearances before the committee became accepted practice in 1955, when John M. Harlan testified.
Confirmation hearings are sometimes polite, quiet affairs, but some have been intensely political dramas that have gripped the nation. In 1987, for example, the Senate held 12 days of rancorous hearings into President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Judge Robert Bork. Although Bork had strong qualifications, his conservative views led many groups throughout the country to oppose his nomination. Some senators charged that he had undergone a “confirmation conversion”-contradicting his earlier published views to secure appointment. The full Senate defeated the nomination by a vote of 58 to 42. In 1991 President George Bush nominated Judge Clarence Thomas to replace the ailing Thurgood Marshall. An initial debate over his qualifications gave way to a nationally televised drama over a leaked accusation by Oklahoma University Law School Professor Anita Hill that Thomas had sexually harassed her. Thomas bitterly denied the allegations, charging that he was the victim of a “high-tech lynching.” The Senate eventually confirmed him by a vote of 52 to 48, the second closest vote in history.” (1)
Resources
Notes and References
- Information about Justices Appointment in the Encarta Online Encyclopedia
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