GREENBERG ON COURT APPOINTMENTS

David Greenberg has a solid piece in WaPo on the "obvious" (his words) influence of political ideology on the Supreme Court nominations process, here. Greenberg gives a thumbnail sketch of some high-profile controversial court appointments and surveys the reasons why the nominations process has become so politically contentious in the past few decades. Here is Greenberg on the early history of appointments:

[U]nacknowledged partisanship was not the norm for court appointments in earlier eras. In the nation's first century, senators were deeply involved in the appointments, often objecting to a president's nominees for unabashedly political reasons. Between 1789 and 1894, 22 of 81 presidential Supreme Court nominees failed to reach the bench. They were either rejected, withdrawn or left unacted upon by the Senate. The reasons senators gave were sometimes baldly political. For example, George Washington's nomination of John Rutledge to be chief justice in 1795 foundered because Rutledge opposed the newly negotiated Jay Treaty with Great Britain. Nathan Clifford, James Buchanan's choice for the bench in 1858, was rejected for being too pro-slavery. And radical Senate Republicans beat back Ulysses S. Grant's effort in 1870 to place on the court Ebenezer Hoar, who had opposed the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.

In case the Jay Treaty reference strikes you as odd in the context of partisanship, here is a passage that I came across last week, from The Key of Liberty: The Life and Democratic Writings of William Manning, 'A Laborer,' 1747-1814, edited by Michael Merril and Sean Wilentz:

Manning started writing "The Key of Liberty" in response to the prolonged public controversy over Jay's Treaty. Signed in 1794, the treaty settled a number of outstanding issues between Great Britain and the United States on terms many American s thought humiliating. Antitreaty forces organized furiously to block its implementation, even after the U.S. Senate voted its formal approval in June 1795. Seizing upon a constitutional ambiguity, the treaty's opponents in the House of Representatives threatened to withhold the funds necessary to carry out the treaty's terms. The Federalists counterattacked by having local organizers flood the House with protreaty petitions, while proadministration papers warned of an impending war with Britain unless the treaty was carried into effect. Under the onslaught, House Republicans who had any political weakness whatsoever faced heavy public and private pressure. The tie-breaking vote in favor of the treaty was cast by a member of the Democratic Republican opposition, Frederick Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Committee of the Whole. Early in the controversy, he had received a warning from the Federalist father of his prospective daughter-in-law that 'if you do not give us your vote, your son shall not have my Polly'; after the vote, he was stabbed by his brother-in-law, a Republican hothead. (118)