TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: SENATORS‘ OPENING STATEMENTS AT SUPREME COURT CONFIRMATON HEARINGS
This article examines the opening statements made by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee at Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Its aim is to identify the audiences senators target in their opening statements and to examine the messages they send to these audiences. The article shifts the focus away from the outcome of Supreme Court nominations to the “nomination discourse” of confirmation proceedings. Although senators use their opening statements to send a variety of messages to multiple audiences, they tend to emphasize the themes of judicial philosophy, the questioning of nominees, and the Senate's role in the confirmation process.
The Role of Ideology in Senate Confirmation of Supreme Court Justices
This paper develops and tests a model of roll-call voting on Senate confirmation of Supreme Court justices. The model assumes that senators prefer to vote for nominees ideologically close to them and against nominees who are ideologically distant. However, under normal circumstances in which the nominee appears qualified and the political environment favors the president, a senator is not likely to cast an ideologically motivated vote against a nominee. Such a vote will probably not lead to the defeat of the nominee, and yet it might come back to haunt a senator at re-election time. The decision calculus of an ideologically distant senator changes as an objective case can be made against a nominee's qualifications. In this case the costs of opposing a vulnerable nominee are lower. At the same time the benefits of opposition rise as the odds increase that the * Associate Professor of Political Science, S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook; B.A., S.U.N.Y. Albany, 1978; M.A., Michigan State University, 1980; Ph.D., Michigan State University, 1983. The authors would like to thank Renee Adwar, Yen Giang, and Regina Stephanie Good for their assistance on this project. Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. SES-8812935. ** Associate Professor of Political Science, S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook; B.A., Wesleyan University, 1969; M.Phil., Yale University, 1971; Ph.D., Yale University, 1976. *** Assistant Professor Political Science, S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook; B.A., Austin College, 1976; M.P.A., Princeton University, 1981; Ph.D., Princeton University, 1988. KENTUCKY LAW JOURNAL disliked nominee can indeed be defeated. Similarly, the benefits of opposition increase when the political environment is hostile to the president, for defeat may again be likely. The model is tested with probit on the 2,048 confirmation votes from Earl Warren to Anthony Kennedy. The interactions of ideological distance with candidate quality and the political environment have powerful effects on confirmation votes.
PLEASURE, POWER, AND THE PURSUIT OF COMMUNISM: SOVIET YOUTH AND STATE-SPONSORED POPULAR CULTURE DURING THE EARLY COLD WAR, 1945-1968
art, with certain students accused of “showing political immaturity, failing to understand the Party’s positions on art.” This episode constituted part of a broader crackdown on abstract art by the Khrushchev administration from late 1962, precipitated the the Soviet leader’s derision of such art forms in December 1962 at the Manege exhibit. Such instances demonstrate the limitations of the top-level promotion of youth grassroots initiative, as the Khrushchev leadership reigned in youth autonomy when it threatened to go beyond the boundaries of the permissible. The dates cited above have particular resonance, since both 1957-58 and 1962-63 represent two periods when those at the top of the Party hierarchy moved away from pursuing a more pluralistic, tolerant policy course, due to anxiety inspired by both sharpening Cold War hostilities and domestic developments. In these periods, official rhetoric censured what it labeled as 639 TsAOPIM, f. 635, op. 13, d. 546, ll. 56-57. This is likely related to criticism of the Party associated with the fallout from the Secret Speech and the Hungary invasion. For more, see Polly Jones, “From the Secret Speech to the Burial of Stalin: Real and Ideal Responses to De-Stalinization,” in Jones ed., The Dilemmas, 41-63. 640 TsAOPIM, f. 6083, op. 1, d. 52, ll. 166-67. 641 Susan E. Reid, “In the Name of the People: The Manege Affair Revisited,” Kritika 6.4 (Fall 2005): 673716. 642 On these anxieties, see Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer, 156-88.