My new Confirmation Tales post discusses the “Ginsburg Rule” governing a Supreme Court nominee’s testimony that Ruth Bader Ginsburg adopted at her 1993 confirmation hearing: “no forecasts, no hints.” (Or, as she also put it, “no hints, no forecasts, no previews.”) An excerpt:

Ginsburg was the first Supreme Court nominee of a Democratic president since Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency, and the first such nominee since the outbreak of the modern confirmation wars in the 1980s. She thus set an important precedent by her crisp articulation of the Ginsburg Rule, a precedent that many later Supreme Court nominees and their proponents have been eager to embrace….
As a matter of crass politics, Ginsburg had a lot of leeway to adopt a standard much more permissive than “no forecasts, no hints.” Her nomination had not hit any bumps, and on the day her hearing opened, Senate confirmation was all but certain: Democrats had a huge margin in the Senate (56-44 after a Texas seat flipped to Republicans in mid-June), and lots of Republicans were already on board.
Republican senators and moderate Democrats were grateful for the Ginsburg Rule, even as liberal Democrats were frustrated by it. The less that Ginsburg said on hot-button issues, the easier it would be for Republican senators to justify, or at least explain away, their votes for her. Conversely, she would have put them on the hot seat by being very outspoken.
That explains why Senator Strom Thurmond, who had been a “firebrand” at Thurgood Marshall’s confirmation hearing in 1967, meekly opened his questioning of Ginsburg by assuring her that if he asked any questions that she thought were “inappropriate to answer,” she should simply “speak out and say so.” Just a few minutes later, when Ginsburg observed that a question of Thurmond’s about a proposed constitutional balanced-budget amendment touched on a matter that might some day come before the Court, Thurmond interjected, “Well, you don’t have to answer it, then, if you feel that you shouldn’t.”

There is much more in the post, including how Elena Kagan’s view of the matter (“air of vacuity and farce”) changed when she became the Supreme Court nominee in 2010.

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