Filling Supreme Court Vacancies

President Clinton will likely have the opportunity to fill several vacancies on the Supreme Court. How should he go about doing it? Although the president should look to a variety of considerations, by far the most important is a prospect’s substantive political commitments. By substantive political commitments, I mean a prospect’s stance towards the central, inescapable, politically significant controversies of our time. ...

Pleas to de-politicize the selection and confirmation process, to cherish unpredictability in the future course of nominees, to purposefully keep ourselves ignorant about the beliefs of people we empower, represent a quasi-religious yearning to make the Court into a shrine above the messiness of politics. But what the process of selection and confirmation needs is more rather than less “politics” -- more widely available knowledge about nominees, more debate, more participation by the governed, more presidential accountability for nominees, and more common sense.

Neither the president nor the public should be asked to accept a pig in a poke. To know fully the political character of those he is considering selecting, the president must ask pointed questions -- and demand pointed answers.

Randall Kennedy, professor of law at Harvard Law School and editor of Reconstruction magazine, in the summer issue of The American Prospect