IS THE JUDICIAL CONFIRMATION PROCESS BROKEN? WHAT WOULD HAMILTON, TOCQUEVILLE, AND MONTESQUIEU DO?
Professor Stephen B. Presser Northwestern University School of Law CLICK FOR PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION One hundred seventy years ago Alexis de Tocqueville observed that there is no significant political dispute that doesnt sooner or later wind up in American courts, but even Tocqueville could not anticipate the situation in late twentieth and early twenty-first century America where judicial disputes have become a white-hot political issue. The future of American jurisprudence is now being decided in the United States Senate, where a small group of judiciary committee members, most notably Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY), Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL), and Senator Patrick Kennedy (D-MA), have been articulating a theory for blocking several of the judicial nominees of President George W. Bush. This theory, based on the notion that there is such a thing as judicial ideology, and put forth most dramatically in some Senate hearings orchestrated by Senator Schume
