CPRC at Fox News: “Here is a simple rule of thumb” for evaluating how Democrats react to Trump’s Supreme Court Pick

Jan 31, 2017 | Featured

Dr. John Lott has a new piece at Fox News where he explains how to evaluate the Democrat’s reaction to Trump’s Supreme Court pick.

Here is a simple rule of thumb: you can judge the caliber of President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee by how angry the Democrats get.  The smarter and more influential the nominee, in an important sense the more qualified they are, the angrier Democrats will get.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has said that he will fight “tooth and nail” against any nominee who isn’t “mainstream.”  But Trump gave voters his list of potential nominees and election exit polls show that 21 percent of voters considered U.S. Supreme Court appointments to be the most important factor in casting their votes.

Tracking federal judge appointments over the past four decades, I have found that confirmations took much longer for graduates of top-10 law schools who served on their school’s law reviews. In fact, it took 65 percent longer compared with graduates who neither went to top law schools nor did particularly well there. Among nominations from the Carter through the George W. Bush administrations, confirmations took about 160 percent longer for the top students at top law schools who further distinguished themselves with clerkships on the Supreme Court.

We find the same phenomenon in jury selection, where lawyers often disfavor intelligent candidates or ones who make a living by persuading others. The concern is that these people will have a strong influence on their fellow jurors. Greg Mankiw, a Professor of Economics at Harvard University, was only considered for five minutes before being dismissed from jury duty.  As he later wrote on his blog, “The only information they had about me at the time was based on a brief questionnaire, which did not say much more than my name, address, and occupation.” This caused Mankiw to wonder: “Why does being a professor of economics at Harvard make one an undesirable juror in such a case?”

Likewise, Democratic senators don’t want a conservative Supreme Court Justice, even one who is somewhat closer to their views, who will be effective at persuading his colleagues.

Justices or lower-court federal judges can also exert influence by writing powerfully-worded decisions that are more likely to be cited in future rulings. Here, the evidence of “dumbing down” is striking. According to my analysis, federal judges faced 60 percent longer confirmation processes if their opinions once they are confirmed were cited 20 percent more often than those of their peers.  Senators turn out to be very good at predicting how influential judges will be, and looking directly at citations is an even better measure of influence than where someone went to law school. . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

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