Traditionally, lower federal court nominations were confirmed swiftly and unanimously by the Senate. However, increasingly, lower court confirmations have become lengthy and contentious proceedings. Traditional explanations for this shift have centered on the temporal political environment and the ideological extremism of the nominees. We propose an alternative theory to explain this phenomenon: interest group opposition. We posit that interest groups sound ''fire alarms''-raising the salience of a lower court nomination-thereby forcing senators politically aligned with the groups to abandon the senators' default positions (confirm swiftly) and instead give the opposed nominee thorough consideration and perhaps even block confirmation all together. Our theory is supported by exclusive interview testimony from key players in judicial confirmation politics. We also test our theory using data on all U.S. Courts of Appeals nominations, 1985-2004. We find interest group opposition far eclipses previous explanations about lower court confirmation outcomes and timing.
Only twenty-five years after its founding, the Federalist Society today boasts a nationwide membership including renowned attorneys, politicians, policy makers, and jurists. Although the Society maintains that it is not a political organization, liberal political activists claim the Society has long pursued an ambitious—and extremely conservative—political agenda. In this article we ask: do members of the Federalist Society decide cases in a more conservative manner than other nonmember jurists? Using data on decision making in the U.S. Courts of Appeals, we find Federalist Society members are significantly more conservative than nonmembers and examine the long-term implications of our study.
In this article, I examine whether divided government has any meaningful impact on the type of judges appointed to the lower federal courts. Specifically, I compare the voting behavior of Clinton judges confirmed before and after the Republicans took majority control of the Senate as well as the voting behavior of judges appointed by President Reagan before and after the Democrats took control of the Senate in the 1980s in order to detect whether judges appointed under divided government are more moderate than those under unified government. Believing that the Senate lacks the resources to have a meaningful impact in shaping judicial ideology on the lower federal courts—as hundreds of judges must be confirmed during the course of a presidential administration—I hypothesize that there is no difference in voting behavior between judges appointed under united and divided government. Consistent with my hypothesis, I find that there is no difference in voting behavior between judges appointed during united and divided government in three critical issue areas: search and seizure cases, race discrimination cases, and federalism cases. This was true of judges appointed during the Clinton and Reagan presidencies, and was true in all three issue areas tested.
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