The Senate, voting largely along partisan lines in February 1829, postponed Crittenden’s nomination, as well as two of Adams’ three December nominations for federal district judgeships. In December 1828, two weeks after Andrew Jackson defeated incumbent John Quincy Adams in the Electoral College, Adams nominated Kentucky lawyer John Crittenden to replace Justice Robert Trimble, who had died that August. The next big nomination battle, also after an election, involved Adams’ son. Jefferson later convinced Congress to abolish the new judgeships. William Marbury, an Adams appointee for District of Columbia justice of the peace, sued to receive his commission anyway, but lost the case. When Jefferson took office, he refused to acknowledge some of Adams’ judicial appointments. Adams quickly appointed men to fill them. Just before Adams left office, Congress created dozens of new judicial positions. While the case is well known for establishing the court’s power of judicial review, its facts are less remembered. Thomas Jefferson’s successful fight against John Adams’ “midnight judges,” appointees rushed through in Adams’ last days in office in 1801, led to the famed Supreme Court case Marbury vs. There was no such fig leaf with Garland.”īattles over a president’s late-term judicial nominations are nearly as old as the Constitution itself. “Even you if can look at it and raise your eyebrows, and say, ‘Well, that really doesn’t seem like the real reason,’ they at least felt they needed that fig leaf. “On several of these failed nominations, there seem to have been ostensible merit-based objections,” says Geyh. Past senators kept their political motives unspoken today’s admit them with pride. So the historical record of why the Senate ran out the clock on the early nominees is thin, leaving historians to interpret its political motives from news accounts and correspondence of the time. The mid-1800s seat-snatchings took place before hearings on Supreme Court nominees were standard protocol, and before nominations were the subject of much open debate. Though Garland’s failed nomination was far from unprecedented, at least one aspect of the modern Republican Senate’s move was new. “In reality, we have always had a highly politicized selection process.” Several times in the 1800s, Geyh says, “the Senate certainly appears to have delayed with an eye toward saving the nomination for the next president.” “There is this tendency to view history through rose-colored glasses from time to time, and to suggest we’ve never been this political,” says Charles Gardner Geyh, a law professor at Indiana University and author of the 2008 book When Courts and Congress Collide. And they produced justices who-as Neil Gorsuch might-ascended to Supreme Court seats set aside for them through political calculation. Those decades of gridlock, crisis and meltdown in American politics left a trail of snubbed Supreme Court wannabes in their wake. What the Senate did to Merrick Garland in 2016, it did it to three other presidents’ nominees between 18, though the timelines and circumstances differed. That’s because conservatives who argued that the Senate has refused to vote on Supreme Court nominees before had some history, albeit very old history, on their side. Senate Democrats such as Chuck Schumer and Patrick Leahy called the GOP’s move unprecedented, but wisely stuck to 20th-century examples when they talked about justices confirmed in election years.
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Last year, when Senate Republicans refused to vote on anyone President Barack Obama nominated to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia, Democrats protested that the GOP was stealing the seat, flouting more than a century of Senate precedent about how to treat Supreme Court nominees. It is intended to reserve this vacancy to be supplied by Gen. “This is equivalent to a rejection, contingent upon the result of the pending Presidential election. Bradford…as successor to Justice McKinley was postponed,” reported the New York Times on September 3, 1852. It was 1852, but the doomed confirmation battle sounds a lot like 2016. Senate, blocked due to the hostile politics of the time. But the unlucky nominee’s bid was forestalled by the U.S. As controversy continues over the push to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in another election year, this piece about past battles over nominations to the Court became relevant again.Ī Supreme Court justice was dead, and the president, in his last year in office, quickly nominated a prominent lawyer to replace him. Editor’s Note, September 25, 2020: This article was published after Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court expired after Senate Republicans declined to hold a vote on President Barack Obama’s nominee because it was an election year.
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