shape the office to this day, declined to run for a third term, but he added an associate justice and a chief justice during the election year of 1796.

Jackson and Cleveland followed the two-term tradition, and each appointed two members of the Supreme Court in the election year before leaving office. Like Obama, Jackson faced an obstinate Senate, which had postponed a vote on his nominee Roger Taney for an associate justice position early in 1835. Old Hickory renominated Taney nearly a year later, this time to chief justice, upon the death of John Marshall. Taney, the Court’s first Catholic, assumed his seat just seven months before the 1836 presidential election.

Three presidents who appointed Supreme Court justices in an election year (Hoover, Taft and B. Harrison) were runningfor reelection but ultimately lost. If Hoover hadn’t replaced retiring Justice Holmes in February 1932, the court might have been denied the intellectual services of Benjamin Cardozo, by all accounts a stellar justice. Hoover faced a closely divided Senate, but Cardozo was so universally admired that his confirmation was unanimous.

William Howard Taft, who would lose his 1912 reelection campaign, achieved the position he most coveted, chief justice of the United States, when appointed to the high court by Warren Harding in 1921. In an interesting twist, Taft served on the Supreme Court with the associate justice, Mahlon Pitney, whom he had appointed in his last year before leaving the White House.

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Franklin Roosevelt and four other presidents (Nixon, Eisenhower, Wilson, Cleveland and Jefferson) placed justices on the Supreme Court