“Wow. That’s a blast from the past.”
[image_caption]Dwight D. Eisenhower[/image_caption]
Susan Eisenhower was a guest on “Skullduggery” last week, a political podcast to which I listen often and enjoy. She made reference to the fact that her grandfather, Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, had appointed a liberal Democrat, William Brennan, to a vacancy on the Supreme Court because his previous Supreme appointees during his first term had Republican backgrounds.
Eisenhower had made two Supreme Court appointments during his first years in office. In his fourth year, heading into reelection in 1956, another Supreme Court vacancy occurred and Ike thought it was important to make a statement that lifetime Supreme Court appointments should not be used to pile up justices from the president’s own party.
Susan Eisenhower has written several books about her grandfather, including one titled “How Ike Led.” (In case you don’t know, Eisenhower went by the nickname “Ike.”)
During her “Skullduggery” interview, she said that, when doing her research for “How Ike led”:
“I was amazed to see that in 1956, when another Supreme Court opening occurred, President Eisenhower asked his attorney general, Herbert Brownell, to find a Democrat. His reasoning was that the Supreme Court must be ideologically balanced, because it is a non-elected co-equal branch of government and the public has to have confidence in the Supreme Court, that it is apolitical.
“And I thought, wow, that’s a blast from the past.”
It is, although not that far in the past.
Presidents have been appointing justices for two and a third centuries. For most of that time, partisanship was much less of a factor than it has become recently. Many justices were confirmed in U.S. history, often unanimously or by overwhelming bipartisan votes, without any committee hearings in many older cases.
But recent history has changed all that. Democratic presidents are expected to appoint liberal justices, Republicans conservative judges, and preferably young ones so they serve for many decades.
Great efforts are made to anticipate how a potential nominee will vote on controversial cases that will set or break precedents. Although this is understandable, there’s something wrong with it. Laws are supposed to be made by elected legislators or members of Congress. But, especially in recent decades the high court has turned into a kind of unelected super-legislature, often suspected of pursuing policy goals rather than their intended job of interpreting laws according to the intent of those who wrote them, elected members of Congress and state legislatures.
Perhaps that’s a naïve take on the older history. But the newer history is very clear. Supreme Court appointments are highly scrutinized, partisanized and highly ideological to a degree that they undermine the older understanding about which branch is supposed to make the laws and which is just supposed to interpret and apply them to specific cases.
I don’t assume that Susan Eisenhower is the authoritative guide on these matters. (By the way, her grandfather once famously said of his presidency: “I made two mistakes and both of them are sitting on the Supreme Court.” The Brennan appointment was one of the two he meant. But the other, and probably more significant appointment to which he referred, was Earl Warren, who was a Republican.)
You can access the full Skullduggery episode in which the exchange occurred here.
I should note that Susan Eisenhower appears in the second half of the “Skullduggery” episode. The first half is taken up with guest Rep. Jim Clyburn, the South Carolina Democrat whom George W. Bush dubbed “the Savior” for his key role in getting the Democratic nomination for Joe Biden (which, one assumes, means that Biden was the best choice to defeat Donald Trump and that Bush believed the defeat of Trump was necessary to “save” the American experiment in Democratic-Republicanism).
And, like Earl Warren, George W. Bush is a Republican.
Ike was not a ‘politician’ by normal standards. He had the bigger picture in mind, not just the party or the political cronies. He led armies and was a great man. We have much to thank him for. We could use a leader like this again, but doubt he would every even get considered in today’s political climate, both left and right.
It’s hard to know.
One possible future is that a rift in the GOP splits off the Trump die-hards from more traditional conservatives. The latter group might need to field a more moderate, Ike like candidate to have a chance of attracting Dems if Harris or whomever runs in 24 is trending more left.
We’ll learn more as the impeachment trial progresses. Does the GOP side with the Cruz/Hawley wing or gravitate more towards Romney &, apparently, Murkowski. Collins has been notably quiet – has she reconsidered her earlier view that Trump “learned an important lesson” from the first impeachment? Senators Portman and Toomey have chosen not to run again – is that a hint that they might vote to convict?
I may still be too optimistic.
As I recall, both parties wanted him to be their Presidential candidate.
Sadly, I’d agree that a true, proven leader like Ike wouldn’t go very far politically in today’s hyper-partisan atmosphere. The nation sorely needs a less-partisan, pragmatic leader who can earn respect across party lines. But both major parties are controlled by their extremes, each more focused on pounding the other into submission than seeking middle ground.
I find it interesting that three consecutive 20th century presidents – FDR, Truman and Ike – are considered by a majority of historians to be among the nation’s 10 greatest presidents. By contrast: our last two presidential elections have been contests to determine which major party candidate is least undesirable
Based on the performance of the Supreme Court beginning in 1970 with Nixon’s appointees, Supreme Court justices (and other federal judges) should be limited to ten year terms. Nothing in the Constitution requires that justices or judges receive lifetime appointments. Lifetime appointments has not prevented atrocities like the Belotti and Citizen’s United cases granting corporations free speech, the decisions on voting rights, on civil rights, freedom of religion, or the series of decisions which have emasculated the antitrust laws. The Burger, Rehnquist and now Roberts courts have been a series of disasters for actual human beings.
“Supreme Court must be ideologically balanced, because it is a non-elected co-equal branch of government and the public has to have confidence in the Supreme Court, that it is apolitical.”
What a novel idea! Especially that part of “apolitical”
WWII certainly impressed Ike with an appreciation of solidarity toward a purpose (or something like that).
What has changed since those days of American “can-do” attitudes and solidarity for our allies and against the Soviet Union?
“Nearly 12,000 active lobbyists in Washington, D.C., helped thousands of clients spend over $3.5 billion in 2019.” [google]
Exactly:
“Only 3% of Congressmen became lobbyists in 1947; today 42% of former members of the House and 50% of former senators take lobbying jobs. The number of registered lobbyists in DC increased from 5,000 in the fifties to 12,000 today – a figure that hides the thousands of lobbyists who hide behind titles like consultant and strategist. ”
“While a spectacular coup for lobbyists, the 2004 bill does not represent an anomaly. Zakaria writes that lobbyists extract $3.5 trillion in benefits from government coffers every year at an expense of $3.5 billion in lobbying fees”
Two things we will never see: term limits closing down the sweet gig our elected officials enjoy and lobbying restrictions that would limit the parachute after the sweet gig comes to an end.
We maybe a 50/50 country, but it is 80/20 on politicians who are in it just for themselves first and foremost.
When the term VSP was not sarcasm
Ike had not been involved in politics until he ran for President. I understand that he decided to run as a Republican because Democrats had held the seat of power for decades. He thought it important to have a vigorous two-party system.
I was thinking this really went off the rails when Reagan Nominated Robert Bork. But I see that Nixon tried to get a couple of white supremacists onto the court, only to be rejected by the Senate.
I feel pretty confident that Eisenhower wouldn’t even be considered seriously by the current Republican Party hierarchy. Warning about the military-industrial complex? How will that go over with the myriad defense contractor lobbyists, not to mention legislators from defense-spending-dependent states? And so on.
Indeed, he had a broader view than most at the national level of political life at present. And Dennis Wagner is spot-on with the novelty of an “apolitical” SCOTUS.
I remember during the Reagan era the push for:
“Ron on the Rock”
At Mount Rushmore. And even back then I was dumbfounded how anyone could look at Ike’s career and not say he deserved to be up there before any other 20th century President, with a good argument for FDR too.
And Trump was delusional enough to see himself up there.
Ike’s Bluff, a great book on his Presidency and how he dealt with Russian aggression and arms escalation.
Are you kidding??? Ron Reagan wouldn’t be nominated by today’s Republican party; not after that huge tax increase he signed in 1987.
The Eisenhower Court may have been an anomaly. An apolitical Supreme Court has always been the ideal, but it has seldom been realized. Justices – like the rest of us – have their biases, political and otherwise. If all that mattered were a strict adherence to precedent, schools would never have been ordered to desegregate and a federal minimum wage would be unconstitutional.
As Mr. Dooley so famously pointed out in 1901, “no matter whether th’ constitution follows th’ flag or not, th’ supreme coort follows th’ iliction returns.”
Unfortunately the principal problem of the 21st Century is that nominations/confirmations to the Supreme Court are not actually following “th’ iliction returns”…
Well, you are speaking of the days before the professional “conservative” movement got underway in the 1970s, before the total politicization of the Supreme Court by that movement during the time of St. Reagan. Of course, rightwing outrage over the decisions of the Warren Court on matters like criminal justice, election reform and civil rights in the 1960s were a principal element in the rise of the modern “conservative” movement. Nixon had already begun the process of politicizing the Court in hopes of ending those “liberal” rulings, especially on criminal justice reform.
The American right sees some epochal significance in the rejection of Robert Bork by the senate in 1985. The reality is that he was a far right judicial polemicist who had made his extreme views well known; that’s why he was chosen by Reagan, and that’s why the Dem senate rejected him as “outside the mainstream” of judicial thought. That was the effective end of that standard, btw, because Bork’s replacement Scalia, (who is now the gold standard for “conservative” judges) turned out to be at least as extreme as Bork ever would have been.
It’s a disservice to this subject to act as though “both sides do it” on selecting justices. The few Dem nominees of the past 30 years have actually been moderates, including RBG. There hasn’t been a really “liberal” justice nominated since the days of the Warren Court. But the American right, in contrast, now goes to great lengths to ensure that the picks by Repub presidents have unimpeachable far-right “conservative” credentials. They refuse to have another justice like O’Connor or David Souter (nominated by Papa Bush), both of whom who didn’t turn out to be Scalian extremists but were instead right-leaning moderates. That was an outrage to “conservatives”, and every pick since Souter then has been a devoted acolyte of the far right Federalist Society, a “conservative” extremist group than now supplies almost every appellate judge in America, ensuring rulings that every far right conservative agrees with. Indeed, as Mr Black notes, the “conservative” majority on the Supreme Court now strikes down so many federal laws that it is now acting as a super-legislature, that sees its primary mission as maintaining the “conservative” status quo.
As for Eisenhower’s now quaint idea that the American people should have confidence that the Supreme Court has balanced viewpoints so that the public has confidence that its ruling are not seen as merely partisan, the “conservative” movement has ended that notion for good, as the public now (quite rightly) understands that a Court which was expressly intended to render partisan rulings does indeed render partisan rulings! And the fact that three of today’s “conservative” justices were nominated by a president who lost the popular vote and were then confirmed by bare Repub senate “majorities” of senators who represented much less that a majority of the citizenry means that the Trump Court’s 6 member majority is does not even have democratic legitimacy.
So Eisenhower’s concern about the public losing confidence in the “apolitical” nature of the Court and its rulings has truly come to pass, and will be the case for decades to come. By design.
Guess that last comment’s brother was “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex.” !
Yup. Eisenhower’s role as prophet is looking much better than most.
Of course, he also said: “Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security and unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is, of course, a tiny splinter group that believes you can do these things. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.” So he failed to see the rise of the modern “conservative” movement and its wholesale takeover of (his!) Repub party. Exhibit A for why folks like Eisenhower would have no place in today’s GOP.
Rather a big failure of political prophecy there, but one can’t bat 1.000…
It’s pretty well documented that a major component to Eisenhower nominating William Brennan to the Supreme Court was in an effort to court NE democratic voters & catholics. Not buying the hagiography for Ike on this one.
Yet another quaint notion by Eisenhower: that a Repub presidential candidate would try to curry favor with a regional segment of Dem voters-via a judicial nominee, no less!
I would only note that there could be several reasons why a president picks a particular nominee for the Supreme Court.
When was the last time a modern conservative courted ANY Democratic voters (real ones, not the constructs propped up as “bipartisanship” or disaffected racists)?
Oh, please. Don’t you know by now that it is the duty of Democrats and liberals to reach out to conservatives? Conservatives have no such obligation.
The end of it for me was the Wellstone funeral service. Prior to that I would occasionally vote for conservatives because of the competition or the appeal of the candidate. Jim Ramstad did a very good job of representing the will of the voters in the CD3 and usually got my vote.
That ended when cynical Republicans campaigned on the Wellstone service being a carefully orchestrated election ploy to torpedo Norm Coleman. Republicans at that time always tried to portray the Ds as incapable of organizing a 2 car parade and then the Wellstone service occurs and some mammoth scheme was hatched and deployed.
The service may have gotten away a little, but not do to scheming, rather by people racked by grief like Wellstone’s friend Mr. Klein (the name, I believe)
Pure, cynical, R political treachery that has only grown from there into the black hole that is today’s GOP.
Here is some further back story regarding Ike and the “two mistakes” quote at the link below reported in an older article but with resources. I am not so sure with how Ike handled or maybe did not handle McCarthy and our race divide then that he could not be a choice for the gop today. I do know that my father who was involved in the Battle of Bulge had no love for the man. The link …. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/commander-v-chief/554045/
Sometimes history is cyclical, and sometimes it is not. Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat and sometimes those who do remember the past are also condmned to repeat it. And there are times when history is irrelevant altogether except, possibly, for data mining to justify one’s preexisting conclusions.
The role of the Supreme Court is different from what it was in Eisenhower’s day. Eisenhower contributed to that indirectly by nominating Earl Warren as chief justice, the man who prodded a reluctant court into rendering by a nine to nothing vote, the most consequential decision perhaps in our history, Brown v. Board of Education. Nothing else Eisenhower did as president has had such a lasting or powerful impact on our politics and our nation. Brown v. Board of Education was rightly and properly decided. But it also had a variety of subsidiary effects, and one of them was the politicization of the Supreme Court. The simle fact about Brown is that it should never have been necessary. The political branches of the government should have soleved the problem of school segration through the political process. Brown was necessary because of fundamental flaws in our political system which are not cyclical but which have become steadily worse over time.