A Long, Strange Trip: The Nomination and Confirmation of Justice Harry A. Blackmun - 2
A Long, Strange Trip: The Nomination and Confirmation of Justice Harry A. Blackmun
Joseph F. Kobylka,
## email not listed ##
, Southern Methodist University
The Constitution is a document of specified words and construction. I would do my best to
have decisions not determined by my personal views and philosophy but in terms of its
definite and defined meaning...[however,] many times this is obscure.
- Harry A. Blackmun, nominee, 30 April 1970, New York Times
The White House is highly pleased and gratified that the Senate has acted so expeditiously.
The President believes that Judge Blackmun will have an outstanding record on the
Supreme Court.
- Ron Ziegler, Press Secretary, 13 May 1970, New York Times
Robert H. Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court did not begin the contentiousness and
politicization that have come to characterize staffing the Supreme Court. Indeed, these characteristics
have been securely in place from the very beginning of the Republic (Tribe, 1985; Silverstein, 1994),
though they ebb and flow over the shores of American history. The elevation of Harry Andrew Blackmun
from the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court in 1970 culminated one episode of such a
judicial- constitutional tempest, but its significance was pronounced … both for the Court he joined, and
for the nominations that followed his.
Blackmun’s nomination came in the early phase of the most recent hyper-politicization of the
nomination/confirmation process. The retirement of Earl Warren – more specifically, the opportunity this
created to cut into the constitutional corpus erected by the Court that he led, and the political advantage it
afforded some presidential aspirants – began the modern cycle of the politics of judicial selection. If not
“present at the creation” of this cycle, Blackmun’s appointment was caught up in its earliest tides. In a
way, l'affaire Bork, the tempest around Thomas, and the battles likely to come over replacement of
members of the current Court are, essentially, further chapters of the storm that began with the political
shift away from the decaying New Deal coalition towards the Republican ascendancy of the last quarter
Convention