For my Confirmation Tales series, I thought it would be interesting to get an inside view from the perspective of an actual candidate for a Supreme Court nomination. So I decided to reach out to Second Circuit judge José A. Cabranes, whose name was widely mentioned both for the 1993 vacancy to which Ruth Bader Ginsburg was appointed and for the 1994 vacancy to which Stephen Breyer was appointed.
It would be easy to understand that someone might not be very interested in talking about the unpleasant memory of missing out on a Supreme Court nomination. But in responding favorably to my inquiry, Judge Cabranes could not have been more gracious or more generous with his time. Here is my new post, subtitled “If they kill me for the Supreme Court, they kill me for the Second Circuit.”
A couple of excerpts:
Clinton took a remarkable 86 days to select Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Judge Cabranes says he was amazed at Clinton’s delay and at his inability to make a decision: “I never understood why President Clinton didn’t immediately choose [Eighth Circuit judge] Richard Arnold, whom he knew well and rightly admired. It’s as if he didn’t trust his own judgment, even though he himself was a Yale law school graduate.”
For both the 1993 and 1994 vacancies, Judge Cabranes never had the impression that he would be the nominee, and he thought that he was in the mix “to add some spice or color to the whole process.” Ron Klain, who was then White House associate counsel, invited him on short notice for an interview at the White House: “Please get down here immediately.” But as Cabranes was preparing to head to the airport, a call came from the White House scrapping the interview. Cabranes soon heard that some feminist activists who were close to Hillary Clinton, including some who were friends of his, made clear that they would never find it acceptable for Bill Clinton to nominate Cabranes—who had the undesirable combination of being male, Hispanic, and Catholic….
One mischievous development complicated Cabranes’s candidacy in 1994. Yale law school dean Guido Calabresi informed colleagues that word was spreading among the liberal Hispanic groups supporting Cabranes’s candidacy that Cabranes’s daughter, as an aide to Vice President Dan Quayle, had written a memo assuring the George H.W. Bush White House that Cabranes was pro-life. The story was an utter fiction. But it alarmed Cabranes. It’s one thing to lose out on a Supreme Court nomination. It’s quite another to be damaged in the process. Cabranes worried that “if they kill me for the Supreme Court, they kill me for the Second Circuit.”
If you’re a judge who has a tale or two to tell about your own confirmation experience, please let me know. Ditto for those of you who were involved in the process in the White House, in DOJ, or in the Senate.
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