Democratic justice Stephen Field, probably had his eye on wartime unity.

Every nominee to the Supreme Court in this period was ultimately confirmed. Among them was Earl Warren, the only Supreme Court justice nominated by a Republican president and confirmed by a Republican Senate between Cardozo in 1932 and Sandra Day O’Connor in 1981.

There were two election-year nominations in this period. One, Frank Murphy in 1940, was a traditional spoils-system nomination, as Senate Democrats had the votes (with a 69–23 majority) to ram through a liberal FDR nominee. The other was Brennan, a recess appointment made by Eisenhower three weeks before the 1956 election (as a Catholic New Jersey Democrat, he represented three constituencies that Ike was courting for the election). Lyndon Johnson’s Democratic majority supported Brennan unanimously, andhe would go on to be the most consequential liberal justice in the Court’s history. Eisenhower is the only president since Theodore Roosevelt to make recess appointments to the Court; he also used that route to seat Warren and Potter Stewart.

1968–2017: Consensus Frays

Brown v. Board of Education marked the Court’s shift from the economic-policy fights of the New Deal era and the foreign-policy battles of the 1940s to the more incendiary area of social issues. That trend would escalate dramatically in the 1960s, as the Court moved into areas like school prayer, contraception, and pornography. While the Court in prior eras had been downstream of partisan politics, reflecting the political actors who appointed and confirmed its members, the Court since the Warren era has often been a cause