That’s the subtitle of my most recent Confirmation Tales post, which presents the many parallels between Bill Clinton and Barack Obama when it comes to Supreme Court nominations—and the one big difference. An excerpt:

Both Clinton and Obama were lawyers who had a deep interest in the Supreme Court and who had indeed taught constitutional law—Clinton at the University of Arkansas, Obama at the University of Chicago. Each was married to a liberal lawyer whom he had met in law school—Clinton at Yale, Obama at Harvard. Each, when he became president, was young—Clinton was 46, Obama was 47—and each was regarded as charismatic and rhetorically adept.
Both Clinton and Obama had the gift of two Supreme Court vacancies in their first two springs in office. Both enjoyed a large Democratic majority in the Senate during those years: Democrats had 57 senators in 1993 and 1994, and they had 58 to 60 senators in 2009 and 2010 (including two independents who were part of the Democratic caucus). So both had a safe path to confirmation for their Supreme Court nominees.
Clinton and Obama voiced similar visions of what they were looking for in a Supreme Court justice. Clinton wanted “someone with a big heart,” someone “of genuine stature and largeness of ability and spirit.” Obama likewise asserted that what really matters in difficult cases is “what is in the justice’s heart,” “their broader vision of what America should be.”

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