Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States
C. Nominations to the Court: Increasing Controversy
During the same period, the process by which Justices were appointed to the Court became increasingly public and controversial. The first significantly contested nomination, and the first time that the Senate held a confirmation hearing for a nominee to the Court, was President Wilson’s nomination of Louis D. Brandeis to the Court in 1916.[126] Brandeis, who was one of Wilson’s informal legal advisers, was a leading progressive who had become known as “the people’s attorney” for his successful and high-profile attacks on corporate interests and his dedication to bringing the social and economic impact of regulation to bear on legal arguments.[127]
Brandeis’s nomination was strenuously opposed by many luminaries of the legal and business establishment: former President William Howard Taft; Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell; former Attorney General George Wickersham; and former Secretary of State and War (and current American Bar Association President) Elihu Root, among others. President Wilson defended his nominee, charging that the opposition stemmed from Brandeis’s refusal “to be serviceable to them in the promotion of their own selfish interests.”[128] Another factor in the attacks on Brandeis was bigotry: He was the first Jewish person to be nominated to the Court.[129] After four months of debate, including hearings that Brandeis did not attend, the Democratic-controlled Senate voted along party lines to confirm Brandeis in June 1916.
Fourteen years later, another nomination that was controversial for very different reasons failed to win Senate confirmation. In 1930, President Hoover nominated federal appeals court judge John J. Parker to the Court. Given that Parker was a sitting federal judge, the nomination was initially expected by many observers to yield a smooth confirmation process.
Parker’s nomination ultimately failed, however, because it was vocally and effectively opposed by civil rights groups, led by the NAACP, as well as labor organizations—groups that also shared the progressive sensibility. As a circuit judge, Parker had issued a strongly worded opinion upholding an injunction against the United Mine Workers, earning him the ire of organized labor. The NAACP and other organizations, meanwhile, condemned racially inflammatory remarks Parker had made a decade earlier while running for governor of North Carolina. “The participation of the Negro in politics is a source of evil and danger to both races and is not desired by the wise men in either race or by the Republican Party of North Carolina,” Parker had stated in 1920.[130] Two months after Hoover named Parker, the nomination was rejected by a vote of 39 to 41. It was the Senate’s only rejection of a nominee to the Court in
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