Confirmation Bias: Inside Washington's War Over the Supreme Court, from Scalia's Death to Justice Kavanaugh
Confirmation Bias: Inside Washington's War Over the Supreme Court, from Scalia's Death to Justice Kavanaugh
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Overview
The embodiment of American conservative thought and jurisprudence, Antonin Scalia cast an expansive shadow over the Supreme Court for three decades. His death at a Texas hunting resort in February 2016 created a dilemma for Republican leadership faced with the prospect of yet another Obama Supreme Court nominee, this time one who could tip the ideological balance of the court and alter the course of American history.
In Confirmation Bias, Carl Hulse tells an exclusive account of the rush of events following Scalia’s death, including Mitch McConnell’s extraordinary snap decision to deny President Obama’s nominee so much as a hearing, let alone a vote. The author recounts the unsuccessful Democratic effort to break the Republican blockade on behalf of Merrick Garland, a failure that allowed Donald Trump to exploit the vacancy to entice evangelicals and other leery Republicans to rally support and deliver him the presidency.
Newly empowered, Trump and his White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II moved quickly to install Neil Gorsuch on the court. The plan from the start was to have a second judge with a Republican pedigree—Brett Kavanaugh—join Gorsuch at the first opportunity in order to cement a majority conservative bloc. Aided by McConnell and the willingness of Republicans to bend Senate practices, the new administration set out to remake not only the Supreme Court, but the lower courts as well, further roiling the Senate and threatening public confidence in the federal judiciary.
With unrivaled access to figures on both sides of the aisle, Hulse revisits the judicial wars of the past twenty years to show how those conflicts have led to our current polarization and resulted in not one but two Trump-nominated conservative justices who could be serving for decades. Confirmation Bias is a prodigious look inside the bitter judicial politics that have torn apart the Senate and transformed the modern Supreme Court from an institution that is supposed to rise above partisanship into one that is increasingly an extension of it.
History will show, argues Hulse, that Scalia’s death and the ugly battles fought in its wake represent an inflection point in American politics, changing the trajectory of three vital arms of our government—the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court—in ways McConnell could not have envisioned that night in 2016.Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781982659424 |
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Publisher: | HarperCollins Publishers |
Publication date: | 06/25/2019 |
Edition description: | Unabridged |
Product dimensions: | 5.80(w) x 5.10(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Table of Contents
1 Calling the Play 1
2 A Death in Texas 9
3 "Business to Attend To" 14
4 "Of Course the President Is Going to Nominate Someone" 23
5 Playing It Straight 32
6 Pulling a Biden 38
7 The Oval 45
8 The List: Part I 50
9 Lack of Judicial Temperament 57
10 Should Ideology Matter? 65
1 Filibusted 73
12 The Gang's All Here 83
13 Battle Lines 94
14 Going Nuclear 104
15 Dumbledore 114
16 Stalemate 126
17 The List: Part II 138
18 Upset 144
19 Postmortem 154
20 Gorsuch 159
21 One Horse-Sized Duck 172
22 Nuclear Winter 178
23 Giving the Slip to the Blue Slip 182
24 The Trump Judiciary 193
25 The Kennedy Seat 204
26 Golden Boy 217
27 Advice and Dissent 223
28 The Hearing Will Not Come to Order 230
29 The Paper Chase 235
30 The Letter 242
31 "Forever Change the Senate and Our Nation's Highest Court" 259
32 Endgame 266
33 Repercussions 273
34 Polarized 280
Afterword 291
Acknowledgments 297
Notes on Sources 299
Index 305