In my latest Confirmation Tales post (“Why Orrin Hatch Was Eager to Help Bill Clinton”), I explore the “deference” approach to Supreme Court nominations. An excerpt:

There are some reasonable arguments of principle that can be made on behalf of the deference model, especially in a legal culture in which the ideological divisions over judicial philosophy are not deep. The best argument, I think, would be rooted in senatorial modesty—in a belief that the president is much better equipped than most senators are to identify outstanding legal jurists. But modesty is not a quality commonly associated with senators.
It’s much more likely that Republican senators defaulted into the deference model, from the Nixon presidency forward, as a matter of political advantage, as Republican presidents made fourteen consecutive Supreme Court nominations. Democrats controlled the Senate for all but three of those nominations. (The exceptions were for Sandra Day O’Connor in 1981 and for William H. Rehnquist, elevated to Chief Justice, and Antonin Scalia in 1986.) So support from Democratic senators was needed to get those nominees confirmed.
But whatever the strategic advantage of the deference model might have been, Senate Democrats had abandoned the model, first in their defeat of Robert Bork’s nomination in 1987 and then in their opposition to Clarence Thomas’s nomination in 1991. (Even before Anita Hill surfaced, most Democratic senators were expected to vote against Thomas’s confirmation.) So why would Hatch and Senate Republicans invoke deference when Democratic senators had already made clear that they would not reciprocate?

Read the full post for my answer, and please subscribe (for free, as you please) to Confirmation Tales.