A Supreme Court composed entirely of heretofore little-known, black-robed appeals court careerists is something new and not altogether good.
by Matthew Cooper
Let’s consider some history that points to why politicians did well on the Supreme Court and why presidents chose them. Elected officials used to be standard fare. Today, there are none. The last elected official appointed to the Court was Sandra Day O’Connor. Appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, O’Connor was the majority leader in the Arizona Senate before being appointed to a mid-level state court. The last pol to serve as chief justice was former three-term California Governor Earl Warren, nominated to the high court by Dwight Eisenhower. Warren had also been the Republican presidential nominee Thomas Dewey’s running mate in the 1948 presidential election, California’s attorney general, chair of the state’s Republican Party, and district attorney of Alameda County, which includes Oakland.
Warren became, arguably, the most influential chief justice of the twentieth century. And he did so because he used his immense political skills to forge consensus on a range of issues, from school prayer to civil rights, most notably in the unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which held that segregated public schools were unconstitutional. Warren insisted on a unanimous ruling in Brown because he wanted it to have maximum impact, and it only came about because of his cajoling and wooing. It is considered one of the most formidable acts by any chief justice in the history of the Court. (Warren’s leadership on Brown has been documented in excellent books and a few films well worth seeing.) The Warren Court, at that time, included three former senators—Hugo Black, Sherman Minton, and Harold Burton—and two former attorneys general. The land-mine-strewn political atmosphere on civil rights called for a remarkable political sensibility. In the end, Democratic- and Republican-appointed justices supported the ruling, including Black, who represented Alabama in the U.S. Senate and was no integrationist.
Warren Harding nominated, and the Senate confirmed, former President William Howard Taft as chief justice. Taft used his political skills to press Congress for an extraordinary reorganization and modernization of the federal judiciary, establishing the judicial conference that allows judges with particular expertise to be paired with suitable cases. Taft pushed to build the Supreme Court building it is housed in today. The justices used to meet in the Capitol, and having their building be so recognizable today has helped cement the Court’s status as a coequal branch of government.
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