• “Digging deep into the archival records of presidents
from Herbert Hoover to George W. Bush, Christine Nemacheck has produced
a creative, fascinating, and insightful treatment of how presidents
select their Supreme Court nominees. Nemacheck is the first to offer
a systematic investigation of the political and institutional dynamics
that underlie the White House’s selection of nominees for
the Court. Her account is historically nuanced and analytically
sharp—a must-read for anyone who cares about the past and
future of the nation’s highest court.”
—Sarah A. Binder, The Brookings Institution
|
Strategic Selection:
Presidential Nomination of Supreme Court Judges from Herbert
Hoover through George W. Bush |
| |
| Christine L. Nemacheck |
| 192 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 |
| 2 figures, 10 tables |
| Cloth 978-0-8139-2614-8 • $35.00 |
| Paper 978-0-8139-26743-5 • $19.50 |
| Constitutionalism
and Democracy |
| Paperback available May 2008 |
 |
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.
Christine L. Nemacheck is Assistant Professor
in the Department of Government at the College of William and Mary.
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