Tim Kane documents for the Washington Examiner the extent to which senators cast partisan votes against U.S. Supreme Court nominees.
The four Democrat-appointed justices currently on the Supreme Court received a combined 88 affirmative votes from Republican senators, while receiving 79 negative votes. That means, on average, a majority of Republican senators voted to confirm the nominations of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Steven Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, while 48 percent were No votes.
Do the same math for Democratic senators voting on Republican nominees, and you get a different result: Of all the votes by Senate Democrats in consideration of the four Republican nominees, 79 percent were in opposition. That is, barely a fifth of Democratic senators were willing to support the nominations of Justices Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch.
These numbers don’t include the most partisan nomination vote of modern history, when Democrats held a solid Senate majority and voted down Robert Bork on purely ideological grounds in 1987. That infamous vote killed the integrity of judicial nominations. …
… In raw vote terms, the three most contentious confirmations were for conservative nominees. Gorsuch suffered 43 Nay votes, all from Democrats, in 2017. Alito suffered 40 Nay votes from Democrats in 2006. And Thomas suffered 48 Nay votes in 1991. The only two nominees from the Left to face strong opposition were Kagan’s 36 Nay votes in 2010 and Sotomayor’s 31 Nay votes in 2009.
