http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelbobelian/2016/11/10/will-democrats-be-able-to-block-trumps-supreme-court-nominations/#11f199b23421Coming off the most embarrassing legislative defeat of his presidency, Richard Nixon issued a statement spewing with frustration. “As long as the Senate is constituted the way it is today,” he explained to the American public in a televised speech on April 9, 1970, “I will not nominate another Southerner.”
The speech came at a low point in Nixon’s presidency. For the second time in five months, the Senate rejected his nomination to the Supreme Court, a conservative jurist – or “strict constructionists” as they were called back then – he hoped would begin to undue the liberal rulings issued during Earl Warren’s tenure as chief justice. To advance his electoral inroads in the South, a region historically dominated by Democrats, Nixon also made sure to select two nominees – Clement Haynsworth, Jr. and G. Harrold Carswell – from the region, fusing his ideological preferences with his political ambitions.
Ultimately, nearly a year after the vacancy occurred, the Senate confirmed Nixon’s next selection, Harry Blackmun, a Minnesota judge who went on to author Roe v. Wade, the abortion rights ruling that has been the target of conservative ire for 43 years. Despite Nixon’s control of the White House, the affair represented a monumental victory for Democrats.
The episode has some eerie parallels to modern judicial politics as president-elect Donald Trump prepares to take over the White House.
Ever since Justice Anthony Scalia died unexpectedly in February, the Court has functioned with eight justices. The length of that vacancy, the longest since Nixon’s confirmation defeats, has endured because the Republican-controlled Senate refused to consider President Barack Obama’s nominee, federal appellate judge Merrick Garland.
The unwillingness to consider Garland’s candidacy, a state of inaction unprecedented in modern history, injected additional rancor to what was already a hyper-politicized confirmation process. It also upped the ante on both sides of the political spectrum as Democrats saw an opportunity to capture a majority on the Court – which now stands at four liberals and four conservatives – for the first time since the Nixon administration. That same ideological calculation is what led Republicans to stall Garland’s nomination, declining to hold hearings or take any affirmative measures to assess his candidacy.
It also explained comments by leading Republicans like John McCain threatening to block all nominees should Hillary Clinton prevail. Also assuming a Clinton victory, Texas Senator and former Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz went further than McCain, joining a growing chorus of conservatives calling for a reduction in the size of the Court, which had remained at its current composition of nine justices since 1869.
