‘Fourth Circuit Nominee Reflects on Same Obstruction that Merrick Garland Would Encounter’

That’s the title of my new Confirmation Tales post. I complete my interview with the Reagan administration’s judicial-selection veteran Steve Matthews by exploring his own nomination to the Fourth Circuit two decades later. Here’s how our interview concludes:

Q. When Senate Republicans obstructed Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 2016, liberal academics suddenly started advancing the wacky claim that the Constitution requires that the Senate hold an up-or-down vote on a Supreme Court nominee. The same Appointments Clause of course applies to lower-court nominees as to Supreme Court nominees. You must have been bemused by this episode.

Not so much “bemused,” really. I had long since stopped expecting any commitment to principle from those who deny that the Constitution embodies any. A better word may be “gratified.”

The same procedural ploy that kept me off of the Fourth Circuit kept Merrick Garland off of the Supreme Court. And I’ll take that tradeoff eight days a week.