This book demonstrates that the hearings to confirm Supreme Court nominees are in fact a democratic forum for the discussion and ratification of constitutional change.

Critics claim that Supreme Court nominees have become more evasive in recent decades and that Senate confirmation hearings lack real substance. Conducting a line-by-line analysis of the confirmation hearing of every nominee since 1955—an original dataset of nearly 11,000 questions and answers from testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee—Dion Farganis and Justin Wedeking discover that nominees are far more forthcoming than generally assumed. Applying an original scoring system to assess each nominee’s testimony based on the same criteria, they show that some of the earliest nominees were actually less willing to answer questions than their contemporary counterparts. Factors such as changes in the political culture of Congress and the 1981 introduction of televised coverage of the hearings have created the impression that nominee candor is in decline. Further, senators’ votes are driven more by party and ideology than by a nominee’s responsiveness to their questions. Moreover, changes in the confirmation process intersect with increasing levels of party polarization as well as constituents’ more informed awareness and opinions of recent Supreme Court nominees.

Considers legislation to propose a constitutional amendment to fix the number of Supreme Court Judges at nine; to make retirement compulsory at age 75; to render Justices ineligible to become President or Vice President of US within 5 years of leaving the Court and to clarify appellate jurisdiction of the Court in certain circumstances.

"A must-read for anyone interested in the Supreme Court."—MIKE LEE, Republican senator from Utah Politics have always intruded on Supreme Court appointments. But although the Framers would recognize the way justices are nominated and confirmed today, something is different. Why have appointments to the high court become one of the most explosive features of our system of government? As Ilya Shapiro makes clear in Supreme Disorder, this problem is part of a larger phenomenon. As government has grown, its laws reaching even further into our lives, the courts that interpret those laws have become enormously powerful. If we fight over each new appointment as though everything were at stake, it’s because it is. When decades of constitutional corruption have left us subject to an all-powerful tribunal, passions are sure to flare on the infrequent occasions when the political system has an opportunity to shape it. And so we find the process of judicial appointments verging on dysfunction. Shapiro weighs the many proposals for reform, from the modest (term limits) to the radical (court-packing), but shows that there can be no quick fix for a judicial system suffering a crisis of legitimacy. And in the end, the only measure of the Court’s legitimacy that matters is the extent to which it maintains, or rebalances, our constitutional order.

Considers (88) S.J. Res. 1, (88) S.J. Res. 8, (88) S.J. Res. 12, (88) S.J. Res. 13, (88) S.J. Res. 24, (88) S.J. Res. 27, (88) S.J. Res. 73.

Considers constitutional amendment proposals to authorize state government appointments for House of Representatives' vacancies during national emergencies, to establish nation-wide primaries for Presidential and Vice Presidential nominations, to reduce the voting age to 18, and to prohibit the election of Federal judiciary members to public office.