Open Supreme Court confirmation hearings empowered interest groups to influence them

Evidence

Before 1913, senators were elected by state legislatures, thus limiting their accountability to the general public. And until the 1920s, Senate deliberations on prospective justices nominees were secret. Nominees did not testify, and they were confirmed or rejected without a roll-call vote, so it was impossible to know how individual senators had voted. Now, however, nominees testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in public hearings, as do groups and individuals supporting or opposing the nominee. Since 1982, when President Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor to the Court, the hearings and final confirmation votes have been televised. This opening up of the process has made it easier for groups to mobilize opinion for or against nominees, as occurred during the Bork confirmation battle, and to influence votes on confirmation by pledging to hold senators electorally accountable. Yet whether groups do mobilize depends on the character and views of the nominee. President Clinton’s appointees to the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, were uncontroversial and overwhelmingly confirmed by the Senate. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 544

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the chapter’s earlier point that presidents must balance confirmability against ideological purity and to ch15’s filibuster/interest-group material in later chapters. — connects to: Interest groups increasingly influence federal appeals court nominations — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 514; Progressive openness transformed judicial confirmation into public politics — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 544
• QUESTION: Does televised confirmation correlate quantitatively with rejection rates or group mobilization success?