Author: Christine L. Nemacheck Publisher: University of Virginia Press ISBN: 9780813927435 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 204
Book Description
The process by which presidents decide whom to nominate to fill Supreme Court vacancies is obviously of far-ranging importance, particularly because the vast majority of nominees are eventually confirmed. But why is one individual selected from among a pool of presumably qualified candidates? In Strategic Selection: Presidential Nomination of Supreme Court Justices from Herbert Hoover through George W. Bush, Christine Nemacheck makes heavy use of presidential papers to reconstruct the politics of nominee selection from Herbert Hoover's appointment of Charles Evan Hughes in 1930 through President George W. Bush's nomination of Samuel Alito in 2005. Bringing to light firsthand evidence of selection politics and of the influence of political actors, such as members of Congress and presidential advisors, from the initial stages of formulating a short list through the president's final selection of a nominee, Nemacheck constructs a theoretical framework that allows her to assess the factors impacting a president's selection process. Much work on Supreme Court nominations focuses on struggles over confirmation, or is heavily based on anecdotal material and posits the "idiosyncratic" nature of the selection process; in contrast, Strategic Selection points to systematic patterns in judicial selection. Nemacheck argues that although presidents try to maximize their ideological preferences and minimize uncertainty about nominees' conduct once they are confirmed, institutional factors that change over time, such as divided government and the institutionalism of the presidency, shape and constrain their choices. By revealing the pattern of strategic action, which she argues is visible from the earliest stages of the selection process, Nemacheck takes us a long way toward understanding this critically important part of our political system.
Author: Ilya Shapiro Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1684510724 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 250
Book Description
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2021: POLITICS BY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL "A must-read for anyone interested in the Supreme Court."—MIKE LEE, Republican senator from Utah Politics have always intruded on Supreme Court appointments. But although the Framers would recognize the way justices are nominated and confirmed today, something is different. Why have appointments to the high court become one of the most explosive features of our system of government? As Ilya Shapiro makes clear in Supreme Disorder, this problem is part of a larger phenomenon. As government has grown, its laws reaching even further into our lives, the courts that interpret those laws have become enormously powerful. If we fight over each new appointment as though everything were at stake, it’s because it is. When decades of constitutional corruption have left us subject to an all-powerful tribunal, passions are sure to flare on the infrequent occasions when the political system has an opportunity to shape it. And so we find the process of judicial appointments verging on dysfunction. Shapiro weighs the many proposals for reform, from the modest (term limits) to the radical (court-packing), but shows that there can be no quick fix for a judicial system suffering a crisis of legitimacy. And in the end, the only measure of the Court’s legitimacy that matters is the extent to which it maintains, or rebalances, our constitutional order.
Author: Paul M. Collins Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1107039703 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 313
Book Description
This book demonstrates that the hearings to confirm Supreme Court nominees are in fact a democratic forum for the discussion and ratification of constitutional change.
Author: Amanda Hollis-Brusky Publisher: Studies in Postwar American Po ISBN: 0199385521 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 265
Book Description
Many of these questions--including the powers of the federal government, the individual right to bear arms, and the parameters of corporate political speech--had long been considered settled. But the Federalist Society was able to upend the existing conventional wisdom, promoting constitutional theories that had previously been dismissed as ludicrously radical. Hollis-Brusky argues that the Federalist Society offers several of the crucial ingredients needed to accomplish this constitutional revolution. It serves as a credentialing institution for conservative lawyers and judges, legitimizes novel interpretations of the constitution through a conservative framework, and provides a judicial audience of like-minded peers, which prevents the well-documented phenomenon of conservative judges turning moderate after years on the bench. Through these functions, it is able to exercise enormous influence on important cases at every level.
Author: James L. Gibson Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400830605 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 195
Book Description
In recent years the American public has witnessed several hard-fought battles over nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court. In these heated confirmation fights, candidates' legal and political philosophies have been subject to intense scrutiny and debate. Citizens, Courts, and Confirmations examines one such fight--over the nomination of Samuel Alito--to discover how and why people formed opinions about the nominee, and to determine how the confirmation process shaped perceptions of the Supreme Court's legitimacy. Drawing on a nationally representative survey, James Gibson and Gregory Caldeira use the Alito confirmation fight as a window into public attitudes about the nation's highest court. They find that Americans know far more about the Supreme Court than many realize, that the Court enjoys a great deal of legitimacy among the American people, that attitudes toward the Court as an institution generally do not suffer from partisan or ideological polarization, and that public knowledge enhances the legitimacy accorded the Court. Yet the authors demonstrate that partisan and ideological infighting that treats the Court as just another political institution undermines the considerable public support the institution currently enjoys, and that politicized confirmation battles pose a grave threat to the basic legitimacy of the Supreme Court.
Author: Christopher L. Eisgruber Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691143528 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 255
Book Description
He describes a new and better manner of deliberating about who should serve on the Court - an approach that puts the burden on nominees to show that their judicial philosophies and politics are acceptable to senators and citizens alike. And he makes a new case for the virtue of judicial moderates."
Author: Robert T. Nakamura Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 9780815796169 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 172
Book Description
Despite three decades of vigorous efforts at deregulation across the government, regulation remains ubiquitous. It also continues to be unpopular because it forces individuals and businesses to do things—frequently costly and unpleasant things—that they don't want to do. If regulatory programs are to survive and remain effective, the challenge posed by their endemic unpopularity and political vulnerability must be met. Unlike much of the existing literature on regulation, Taming Regulation begins with the assumption that the government's capacity to utilize regulation as a policy tool is vital. The book examines the questions of how to make the inherently coercive aspects of regulation more politically acceptable in the present antiregulatory environment and how the legal and administrative challenges of reform in ongoing regulatory programs might best be approached. The authors explore these issues through a case study of administrative reform in the Superfund program. Chartered with an ambitious mission to clean up the nation's hazardous waste sites, Superfund was from its inception a uniquely aggressive and unpopular program. Yet despite the election in 1994 of a Republican Congress committed to fundamental changes in environmental regulation, the Superfund program weathered the storm and remains intact today. The authors credit this political and programmatic success to a series of artfully designed and orchestrated internal reforms that softened Superfund's implementation, thus increasing its political support while retaining its potent coercive tools. Taming Regulation provides a cautionary discussion of both the necessity and the difficulty of regulatory reform. It is essential reading for students of regulation and environmental policy, for practitioners contemplating reform of ongoing regulatory programs, and for those interested in the checkered history of Superfund.
Author: David Alistair Yalof Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 9780226945460 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 312
Book Description
Yalof takes the reader behind the scenes of what happens before the Senate hearings to show how presidents decide who will sit on the highest court in the land. He draws on the papers of 7 modern presidents and firsthand interviews with key figures.
Author: Christine L. Nemacheck
Author: Ilya Shapiro
Author: American Bar Association
Author: Paul M. Collins
Author: Amanda Hollis-Brusky
Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary
Author: James L. Gibson
Author: Christopher L. Eisgruber
Author: Robert T. Nakamura
Author: David Alistair Yalof