RECOMMENDED READING
Stephen Henderson of the Detroit Free Press has written an excellent piece of political commentary that smartly connects the Broadway smash “Hamilton,” an unconventional hip-hop recounting of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton’s life, with the unseemly political battle in Washington to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.
Henderson points out that Hamilton, perhaps more than any other player in the creation of our U.S. Constitution, heavily influenced the presidential nominating process in his Federalist Papers essays.
More than 200 years later, clearly neither side of the political aisle on Capitol Hill has clean hands in the three-decade debasement of the SCOTUS nomination protocol. The Senate hearings for presidential nominees Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas degenerated into tawdry political theater. The nonsense spread on talk-radio and social media — and repeated by some senators — about Sonia Sotomayor was disgraceful.
But the ongoing partisan battles in Congress, with each side defining their version of “activist judges,” has deconstructed the nominating process to the point where a bumper-sticker mentality overshadows a high-minded desire to establish the laws of the land.
Here’s a bit of Henderson’s analysis:
It was Hamilton, in Federalists 76 and 77, who made the public case for the nomination and confirmation process for the Supreme Court. It’s Hamilton who first campaigns passionately for the elegance of the checks and balances struck between the executive and legislative branches. And it’s Hamilton who predicts the tensions that would arise between the president and the Senate over nominations, the politics that would confound “the good administration of government,” which he said should always be the goal.
Few may invoke his name over the next few months outside of talk about the Broadway show. But it was Hamilton’s early vision for what role politics ought to properly play in presidential appointments that is being trashed, quite awfully, in the early rounds of the fight over Scalia’s seat.
With Republicans saying, essentially, that the last 12 months of Barack Obama’s presidency invoke some kind of sunset on his appointive power to the Supreme Court, we’ve moved beyond the politics envisioned by the Founders to more overt recasting of the checks and balances established by the Constitution itself.
