VOL. 6 NO. 6 (JUNE, 1996)

SHAPING AMERICA: THE POLITICS OF SUPREME COURT APPOINTMENTS by George L. Watson and John A. Stookey. Harper Collins College Publishers, 1995. 257 pp.

Reviewed by Reginald S. Sheehan, Department of Political Science, Michigan State Univeristy.
 

A continuing objective of scholars of judicial behavior is to expose the mythicism that is integral to the public perception of American judicial institutions. Students of decision making confront the mythical view that judges are objective, unbiased decision makers who follow the doctrine of stare decisis blindly in an effort to secure "justice for all" in society. In SHAPING AMERICA: THE POLITICS OF SUPREME COURT APPOINTMENTS, George L. Watson and John A. Stookey take on the judicial myth that appointments to the Supreme Court of the United States are based on legal and judicial qualifications and not political ideology. The authors focus on all aspects of the nomination process and provide a detailed description of the several stages which are involved in appointing a Supreme Court justice. The book is written concisely and lively with attention to providing the reader with technical information combined with anecdotal explanations.

The central theme of the book is that the appointment process is permeated with politics and ideological concerns, and more importantly, the process should be political. The authors emphasize the importance of appointments to the Supreme Court, both in terms of the immediate policy impact an appointment will have on decisions and the long term potential for a presidential legacy to develop. The underlying premise throughout the book is that given the significance of these appointments and the fact that senators and presidents recognize the political and policy implications of appointments, we should expect confirmations processes to be highly controversial. Rather than criticizing the nomination process for creating the Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas hearings, the authors suggest that in a democratic system which gives tremedous power to justices with very little structures of accountability to constrain their behavior, we have to have a process which identifies the policy views of the individuals before they are appointed. Many would argue that the defintion of politics is controversy among opposing policy views. Politics is central to the appointment process, therefore, the confirmation process must be controversial. Utilizing this theme the authors work their way through the process of confirmation beginning with the early stages of identifying the nominee and ending with the eventual vote on the senate floor.

In examining the different steps in the confirmation process, a process which the authors refer to as the "nomination discourse," they identify the factors they perceive as contributing to controversial nominations. They make a persuasive argument that controversial nominations can be predicted, and it would follow that they could be avoided, if the actors involved recognize the "nomination setting" and the "timing of the nomination." Specifically, they point to four factors they believe contribute to a controversial nomination. The four factors include public opinion of the president, political composition of the senate, level of support in the senate for the president's programs, and attributes of the vacancy itself. The authors discuss the different iterations of these factors, with the assistance of examples from past nominations, to demonstrate why some nominations are extremely controversial and others have moved through the process quickly and with little or no resistance. Of course, ultimately the characteristics of the nominee become central to the nomination discourse, but Watson and Stookey argue that these four factors determine the type of nominee which will be acceptable or not acceptable. Under one scenario, Clarence Thomas might not be controversial but under a different variant the nomination becomes controversial even thought the candidate did not change. The obvious empirical problem is that we cannot test this theory but it is an interesting construct around which to base a discussion of how the confirmation process operates.

Once the nominee is determined the process moves to the the media and interest groups which is then followed by senate judiciary committee hearings and finally the vote on the floor of the senate. Watson and Stookey trace this movement of the nomination with emphasis on both providing a technical description of the process and suggesting to the reader points at which ideological conflicts might occur. In Chapter Four they discuss the four major groups or actors who influence the discourse during the interim period between the president nominating a candidate and the judiciary committee hearings. The four groups examined are the American Bar Association, the American public, advocacy groups and the media. Chapter Five provides and overview of the structure and operation of the senate judiciary committee and how it affects the confirmation process. There is a detailed discussion of the hearings and an analysis of factors influencing the votes of individual senators. Chapter Six focuses on the full senate and how the nomination discourse is continued in the debate on the floor. The authors examine controvesial nominations and discuss the role partisanship and ideology played in the votes of senators in these nominations. Finally, in Chapter Seven, Watson and Stookey return to their original premise that the confirmation process is recognized as a political debate by all the actors involved and therefore we should expect controversy to be apart of the process. Moreover, we should cast aside the myth that the confirmation process is intended to seek out the most highly qualified candidate and accept that the process is intended to locate the most politically acceptable candidate given the environment in which the nomination discourse isl taking place.

Watson and Stookey state in the preface that their desire was to write an academic book on the nomination process, but while writing the book they realized that much of this material was useful in the classroom. I would agree completely with this assessment. This is a book I would use in a judicial process class and it could also be used in a class on presidential politics or a class on the Congress. The book is perfectly suitable for an undergraduate class and possibly as a supplement in a graduate class. My only reservations about its suitability at the graduate level is that it is much more descriptive in orientation and less research intensive in terms of data analysis. In the end the book developed into a very good textbook on the confirmation process and has become less of an academic book.


Copyright 1996