Cultivating Political Support

Sometimes a president will view a Supreme Court nomination as an opportunity to cultivate or reward needed political support. This motivation is similar to insuring representational interests. However, demands and expectations for the representation of interests are essentially nonpartisan; they are directed at both parties. Thus, regardless of who is president or which party dominates the political scene, there is now an expectation that the Court will never be without a female justice. With the Thomas nomination, the same expectation may have been created for African-American representation.

Those initial appointments, however, involved rewarding and seeking political support. In the case of Thurgood Marshall, President Lyndon Johnson rewarded the strong support he received from African–American voters while cultivating their continued support of the Democratic Party. Ronald Reagan's appointment of Sandra O'Connor sought to address the president's gender gap. Both of those appointments, however, created new representations on the Court that would create pressures on any succeeding president to maintain those interests on the Court

The use of nominations to reward and cultivate political support was nowhere more explicit than with President Andrew Jackson, architect of the so-called spoils system. Court appointments were a "means of liquidating political debts or purchasing political aid" (Jackson quote in Robert Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy, 1833–1845, Harper and Row, 1984, p. 268). In his 1968 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon pursued a "southern strategy," designed to secure inroads into the "solid South's" Democratic vote. Nixon made a promise in the campaign to make such an appointment, and his nominations of Clement Haynsworth and Harrold Carswell resulted from that motivation to cultivate political support.

See George Watson and John Stookey, Shaping America; The Politics of Supreme Court Appointments, Harper Collins, 1996, pp. 61–62.

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