Article published in New York Times, April 15, 2022
The increasingly bitter partisan battles over Supreme Court nominations reflect the degree of influence that a single court of nine unelected judges exercises over life in America. As Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearing underscored, the role partisan politics plays on the court is an issue that is not going away.
Supreme Court justices and most other judges insist that politics do not enter into their work. But there is a straightforward metric available that reveals what appears to be a calculated political motivation in judicial decision-making: the timing of judges’ retirements. And increasingly, federal judges have been calibrating their retirements so that their successors will be nominated by a president of the same party who nominated them. Given the lifetime tenure of federal judges, this pattern has long-term ramifications for the courts.
When asked, many judges say politics is not a reference point for them. Amy Coney Barrett, who took her seat on the Supreme Court in the fall of 2020 following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, told students at the University of Louisville last fall that political partisanship does not play a role in decision-making on the court. “Judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties,” she said...
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