Ignoring Advice and Consent? The Uses of Judicial Recess Appointments

@article{Graves2010IgnoringAA,
  title={Ignoring Advice and Consent? The Uses of Judicial Recess Appointments},
  author={Scott E. Graves and Robert Matthew Howard},
  journal={Political Research Quarterly},
  year={2010},
  volume={63},
  pages={640 - 653}
}
The authors seek to answer the questions of why presidents use the power to temporarily seat federal court judges during recesses of the Senate. The use of the recess power can upset the carefully calculated separation of powers envisioned by the framers, shifting power away from one branch of government toward another. Examining every judicial recess appointment from 1789 to 2004, the authors discover that presidents are conditionally strategic in their use of the unilateral authority to… 
View on SAGE
5 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
1
Background Citations
3

Figures and Tables from this paper

5 Citations

President Trump and the Politics of Judicial Nominations

Abstract President Trump brought judicial appointments to the pinnacle of political salience while campaigning and in office. He was also the first president to inherit Senate rules making it easier…

Courts and Executives

William Howard Taft was both our twenty-seventh president and the tenth Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court -the only person to have ever held both high positions in our country. He once famously…

No vacancy: holdover capacity and the continued staffing of major commissions

Although the United States (US) federal bureaucracy is plagued by high vacancy rates generally, quorum requirements and small board sizes make vacancies particularly problematic within major…

Judging Nominees: An Experimental Test of the Impact of Qualifications and Divisiveness on Public Support for Nominees to the Federal Courts

What factors influence how the public judges judicial nominees? In this article we use an experimental approach to examine how variations in the qualifications and ideological and partisan…

Going Nuclear: Rule Manipulation and Judicial Nomination Efficacy

  • Corey Bopp
  • Law
    Open Journal of Political Science
  • 2019
The growing number of federal judicial vacancies impacts judiciary's ability to efficiently resolve litigation. This impact warrants an investigation of any factor that has the potential to affect…

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 44 REFERENCES

Federal Recess Judges

This report discusses the recess clause and takes a look at the history of recess appointments. Under Article II of the Constitution, the President is empowered "to fill up all Vacancies that may…

The Timing of Presidential Nominations to the Lower Federal Courts

Presidents often move quite slowly to exercise their important power of judicial appointment. This study attempts to explain these delays by developing a strategic conception of the timing of…

Advice and Consent: The Politics of Judicial Appointments

From Louis Brandeis to Robert Bork to Clarence Thomas, the nomination of federal judges has generated intense political conflict. With the coming retirement of one or more Supreme Court Justices-and…

Senatorial Delay in Confirming Federal Judges, 1947-1998

presidential appointees to the lower federal bench. Here, we focus on the duration of the confirmation process for presidential appointees to the United States Circuit Courts of Appeal between 1947…

Recess Appointments to the Federal Judiciary: An Unconstitutional Transformation of Senate Advice and Consent

The Judicial Department comes home in its effects to every man's fireside: it passes on his property, his reputation, his life, his all .... will you allow a Judge to give a decision when his office…

Advice and Consent: Senate Responses to Executive Branch Nominations 1885- 1996

The fact that presidential nominations to executive branch positions are routinely approved by the Senate obscures great variance in the length of time that the confirmation process requires.…

To Advise and Consent: The Senate and Lower Federal Court Nominations, 1977-1998

Using nominations to Article III district and appeals court judgeships, we test a model of senatorial treatment of presidential nominations to the lower federal bench, looking both at outcome…

Buyer Beware? Presidential Success through Supreme Court Appointments

One manner in which Presidents attempt to have an enduring policy influence is through the appointment of like-minded justices to the Supreme Court. This article empirically examines Dahl's (1957)…

When is the Senate in Recess for Purposes of the Recess Appointments Clause

The Recess Appointments Clause of the Constitution allows the President unilaterally to fill vacancies in federal offices that occur during Senate recesses, but the power should apply to intersession recesses but not to intrasession recesses.

The Politics of Supreme Court Nominations: A Theory of Institutional Constraints and Choices

When a vacancy occurs on the Supreme Court, the president can attempt to use his power of nomination strategically in order to bring the Court in line with his own policy preferences. However, the…