Welcome to the Supreme Court! (Not So Fast…)
April 6, 2010
Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens may be retiring from the high court as his 90th birthday nears, and names are already being bandied about for his replacement. But as the very rare occasion of a Supreme Court nomination may loom, here’s a look at a few people who were considered for the Supreme Court but didn’t quite make it (for various reasons).
• George W. Bush nominated attorney Harriet Miers in 2005. After three weeks, Miers removed herself from consideration due to bipartisan opposition. The big problem with Miers? She’d never been a judge in any kind of court. Miers had worked as a corporate attorney and was Bush’s chief legal advisor, but the lack of judicial experience didn’t leave much record of her stance on the kind of issues she’d be expected to rule on.
• Today, the Court is made up of nine justices, but in the 1860s, there were spots for 10 judges. Chief Justice Salmon Chase urged Congress to pass legislation to reduce the court to seven slots (reportedly, Chase was hoping the salaries set aside for those extra judges would be split amongst the remaining judges). Chase thought the best way to do it would be to simply not fill the vacancies caused by the next three judges that retired, whenever that may be. Congress only got so far as to reduce the Supreme Court to nine judges, shutting out President Andrew Johnson’s pick, Henry Stanberry.
• In 1987, Ronald Reagan nominated appellate judge Robert Bork for the Supreme Court. He was a well known political figure already, a pioneer on the legal concept of originalism, the idea that the Constitution’s meaning and intent were made clear upon its drafting in the 1780s, and that modern judges should, as such, rule very carefully without trying to overly interpret the law of the land or inject their own politics. It was a controversial stance (especially among Democrats), and Bork’s nomination was nixed by the Senate, 58-42. Not helping Bork was his role in the 1973 “Saturday Night Massacre,” in which a Watergate scandal-ravaged President Richard Nixon ordered Bork (then the acting head of the Justice Department) to fire the independent prosecutor investigating Nixon and his role in covering up the scandal.
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