There's Sonia Sotomayor's 17 years on the federal bench and then there's her judicial philosophy. The White House has continually touted the former as one of the main reasons to confirm her. The Republicans have taken issue with the latter, claiming that she's a "judicial activist" who embodies President Obama's liberal interpretation of the role of the courts.

Chapter 4 of the 2005 book "Advice and Consent," by Stony Brook University political science professor Jeffrey Segal and Northwestern law professor Lee Epstein, examines these two factors -- qualifications and ideology -- in the context of the Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Robert Bork nominations. The following passage is excerpted here as part of the Ninth Justice's ongoing book series:

Virtually from the day George W. Bush nominated Janice Brown to the all-important D.C. Circuit, controversy swirled around her. "Powerful liberal groups," to use Orrin Hatch's phrase, opposed her at least in part because, as a California Supreme Court justice, she had upheld restrictions on abortion rights and opposed affirmative action. Overall, they said, she was "even further to the right than the most far-right justices now sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas." Liberal interests, along with some senators, also asserted that she was unsuited for office. ...

The Senate eventually confirmed Brown by a 56-43 vote -- but two years after Bush initially nominated her. She was the target of a Democratic filibuster that ended only after moderate members on both sides of the aisle drafted a compromise that enabled her confirmation.

Clearly, Brown's political values, not to mention her potential as a Supreme Court nominee, energized opposition from prominent liberal interest groups, which in turn lobbied senators to oppose her. But questions about her professional merit may have played a role too. In other words, all the factors we have considered -- qualifications, partisanship, and ideology -- probably contributed to the long delay and, ultimately, to the divided vote.

But was it merit or politics that exerted the greater influence? That is a hard question to answer for lower court nominees because the Browns are relatively few and far between. The overwhelming majority of lower court nominations that reach the Senate's floor attain consensual confirmation.

But this is not true of candidates for the Supreme Court. Prior to the 1900s, the Senate rejected twenty of eighty-five candidates. And while senators' votes over most nominees since the mid-twentieth century have been unanimous or nearly so, of the 2,451 votes we examined, 378 were nays, or on average about 14.8 per nominee. Nor was dissensus wholly uncommon. In fifteen of the twenty-six cases the candidate caused some degree of division among the senators.

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Although it has long been that ideology influences the decisions of American voters, researchers have recently begun to delineate the conditions under which voters will vote ideologically. Although these studies have been lighting, most tests have failed to account for a critical contextual factor: The candidate ideological divergence. Using a random effects probit model and data from 1988 to 1992 American Studies Senate Elections,vacations packages all inclusive showing that the ideological gap between the candidates for the Senate position to the influence of ideology on vote choice, at least among more politically aware segments of the population.birds for adoption This reinforces and extends the findings of Wright and Berkman to produce candidates ideologically polarized ideological voters

My problem only with the analysis taking into account that most people joined the chorus of the mythology of deregulation proposal lean vested interests to perpetuate the current system and given the lack of a popular artist for their arguments, I'm not seeing much in the way of change.Thanks, Gary Corbett
 

The first proxy, the position the governor holds on abortion, is easily observed. The 50 U.S. governors have stated their opinions on abortion and from this information is constructed a binary variable, GOVOPP, which takes the value of 1 if the governor opposes a woman's right to abortion under most circumstances, 0 otherwise. iPhone

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