during election years that led them to a second term. Ike faced an opening just three weeks before the 1956 election when Justice Sherman Minton left the bench in ill health. Looking for support from the electoral-vote rich Northeast, Eisenhower immediately selected William Brennan, a New Jersey Catholic, in a recess appointment. Catholics, a key component of the FDR’s New Deal coalition, were also represented in FDR’s 1940 election-year nomination of Frank Murphy to fill the seat of deceased Catholic justice Pierce Butler.

Nixon’s two appointments in 1972 of William Rehnquist and Lewis Powell carried out his campaign promise to reshape the court to counter the liberal Warren-era decisions, and contributed to his landslide victory over George McGovern. Nixon couldn’t have predicted that a mere two years later, hisreshaped bench would unanimously rule against him in the Watergate tapes case, with only Rehnquist recusing himself.

Two other presidents (Lincoln and Grant) named Supreme Court members after they had been reelected but before their second inauguration. When Roger Taney died in late 1864, after 32 years on the bench, Lincoln happily replaced the Jacksonian chief justice with his Republican Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase.

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The founding fathers debated how Supreme Court justices should be appointed

Justice Scalia’s 30-year tenure confirms President Gerald Ford’s observation that “few appointments a president makes can have as much impact on the future of the country as those to the Supreme Court.” That truism, even more apposite now when the Court is evenly split on the most contentious political issues of the day, explains