month later, Hayes sent the new Senate another nominee, Stanley Matthews. The Senate ignored Hayes this time, but Matthews was renominated by Garfield and confirmed by a one-vote margin, 24–23, the only justice to be confirmed by just one vote. The Matthews nomination fight would mark the first appearance of what is now a fixture, outside interest groups lobbying against the nominee.

‐In December 1887, seven months after a vacancy opened on the Court, Cleveland (the first Democratic president since before the war) nominated Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, a respected former senator but also a former Confederate official. Lamar faced stiff opposition in the Republican-controlled Senate but was confirmed in January, 32–28.

‐In April 1888, seven months before losing his reelection bid, Cleveland made another nomination, of Melville Fuller tobe chief justice. Fuller was the only historical precedent for the confirmation of a nominee in Garland’s position: an outgoing Democrat nominated him in the teeth of a hostile Republican Senate. He was a partisan Democrat, having managed Stephen Douglas’s presidential campaign against Lincoln in 1860. But he also arrived at a point of unique, non-ideological crisis for the Court, when it was choked with a multi-year backlog in resolving the cases on its docket. Fuller, as a veteran Supreme Court advocate was well-positioned to play Mr. Fixit. (In office, Fuller would be instrumental in getting Congress to expand the federal appeals courts to relieve this burden and create the modern Supreme Court’s power over what cases it takes.) Despite fierce criticism from members of the 38–37 Republican