Presidents' success when appointing justices - Supreme Court - Brief Article

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), August, 2002

When a president names a new justice to the U.S. Supreme Court, he hopes that appointee will support his policies long into the future. However, a study of Supreme Court justices appointed by presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt through Bill Clinton showed that they are successful only in the short term.

While the votes of justices initially tend to agree with the leader who appointed them, within 10 years their votes no longer closely reflect the president's policy views. "The success of presidents at naming justices who will support their views is somewhat fleeting," notes Richard Timpone, assistant professor of political science, Ohio State University, Columbus. Of the 11 presidents studied, Ronald Reagan and Clinton did best at naming justices who followed their policy preferences. Timpone conducted the study with lead author Jeffrey Segal of the State University of New York at Stony Brook and Robert Howard of Georgia State University, Atlanta.

The researchers first conducted a random mail survey of political scientists who specialized in the presidency. They asked the respondents to rate the presidents from Roosevelt to Clinton on a scale of one to 100 on their liberalism in economic policy and social policy. The researchers then examined the voting records of all justices appointed by those 11 presidents, specifically in civil liberties and economics cases. Then they analyzed how closely the votes cast by those justices matched the liberal or conservative views of the president who appointed them.

"Overall, the results showed presidents do reasonably well in appointing justices who seem to follow their policy preferences," Timpone says. "But when you look closer, the success of presidents occurs very early in the career of the justices."

In economics cases, the researchers found a relationship between the votes of the justices and the views of the president who appointed them for the first 10 terms of the justices' careers (each term lasting a year), but after 10 terms, their votes no longer were related to the views of the president. In the area of civil liberties, presidents fare even worse. There is no relation between a justice's votes and presidential views after only four terms on the bench, Timpone reports.

Reagan and Clinton seemed to have the most success in choosing justices who reflected their views, but based on the other results of the study, Clinton's success may decline the longer his justices are on the bench. Reagan was helped because one of his appointments was the promotion of William Rehnquist to Chief Justice. This appointment had less uncertainty, since Rehnquist already had a track record on the bench as an associate justice.

Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman had some of the worst records at appointing justices who shared their views. "Truman appears to have been correct in bemoaning his Supreme Court appointments, at least in the realm of civil liberties," Timpone indicates. "Each of his appointees voted significantly more conservatively than we would have expected." On the other hand, Eisenhower named two justices--Earl Warren and William Brennan--who voted significantly more liberal than expected, given Eisenhower's views.