The impact of presidential appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court: Cohesive and divisive voting within presidential blocs

Previous research by Robert Dahl and others has argued that the predominant pattern of Supreme Court decisionmaking reflects the appointments Presidents make to the Court. But each President's impact on the Court's decisions may be limited if that President appoints multiple justices who fail to vote cohesively In this article we evaluate the relative impact of five Presidents' appointments by focusing on the group behavior of blocs of presidential appointees, emphasizing the extent to which such blocs vote cohesively or fragment in determining actual case outcomes. After first constructing "cohesion scores" for these "presidential blocs" to test the level of cohesive voting within each bloc, we examine particular configurations of votes in order to evaluate each bloc's adherence to its appointing President's ideological expectations on various issues. We find that in order for the chief executive to wield the strong influence hypothesized by Dahl and others, three conditions must be met: (1) the President must have the opportunity to appoint one or more justices; (2) when multiple justices are appointed, they must vote cohesively relative to the Court as a whole; and (3) voting cohesion among multiple appointments must further the President's (and the political majority's) policy preferences. Among modern Presidents, these conditions were fulfilled only by the Nixon and Reagan appointments. Assessing a President's level of satisfaction with his Supreme Court appointments can be a slippery proposition. To those interested in demonstrating the occasional futility of presidential efforts to shape the Court, anecdotal evidence abounds. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes infuriated Theodore Roosevelt with his infamous "anti-antitrust" dissent in United States v. Northern Securities (1904), prompting the President to remark that he "could carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone than that" (Clayton 1964: 47). Angered by what he viewed as an unfavorable outcome in the Steel Seizure case, Harry Truman reportedly referred to his appointment of Justice Tom Clark-who sided against his administration-as "the biggest mistake" of his Presidency (Miller 1974: 225). Dwight Eisenhower apparently confided to associates about his frustrations with various votes cast by Earl Warren and William Brennan. Anecdotal accounts such as these, however, fail to provide a sufficient foundation for systematic evaluation of presidential influence. In addition, a President's dissatisfaction with just one appointment may overshadow the consistently favorable votes he receives from his other appointments. When just one justice causes extreme disappointment in a handful of cases, an appointing President may lose sight of the many favorable votes of all his appointees during a given period of time in controversies large and small. In order to provide this more comprehensive view of presidential success, therefore, this study builds on earlier research on Supreme Court voting blocs (Ulmer 1965; Scigliano 1971) by examining the cohesiveness of Presidents' appointees to the Court. In so doing, we provide a systematic examination of presidential success that focuses not on individual justices' adherence to presidential expectations, but rather that evaluates a President's overall impact on the Court in light of the voting patterns of his bloc of appointees. As with previous studies of presidential success, we start with the theoretical proposition that "the predominant pattern of Supreme Court policy at any given time reflects the appointments that Presidents make" (Baum 1995: 219). A President's power to shape the Court led Robert Dahl (1957) to argue that the Court's decisions are generally consistent with the policy preferences of the dominant political majority, a theme further elaborated by Funston (1975). Although Dahl's thesis regarding the Court's independent policymaking power has been criticized (e.g., Casper 1976), the notion that the Court's changing policy positions result from membership change and ultimately reflect presidential preferences is a well-accepted proposition (see Mishler and Sheehan 1993; Norpoth and Segal 1994). …