enacted in 1933, elections for a new Congress (and, when applicable, a president) were held in the fall of even-numbered years, and then in December the “lame duck” Congress would reassemble for a final session ending on March 4. The term of the new Congress (and, when applicable, the new president) began on March 4, though Congress usually did not assemble (except for a brief Senate session to confirm presidential appointees) until December.

There were no partisan confrontations over the Court in this period, partly due to the Founding generation’s uneasy relationship with open partisanship and partly because the Senate was always under the control of the same party or faction as the president. The First Congress was sufficiently idealistic about nonpartisanship to create a Supreme Court with ancoalesced around Adams (later called the Whigs) and Andrew Jackson (later called the Democrats).*** The story of the period from 1826 to 1841 was the Jacksonian faction’s partisan struggle to take control of the Court.

Adams had been elected by the House of Representatives after no candidate won a majority of the electoral votes in 1824, and his opponents charged that he had gained the presidency through a “corrupt bargain” with Henry Clay. While the Jacksonians were bent on delegitimizing Adams, he still got his first Supreme Court nominee, Robert Trimble, confirmed by a Jacksonian Senate in 1826. However, after Adams lost the 1828 election to Jackson, his lame-duck nomination of Robert Crittenden in December 1828 (to replace Trimble, who had died suddenly in August) was tabled by the