When a U.S. president nominates someone to take over a seat on the Supreme Court, things don't always turn as contentious as they do these days. Since the Supreme Court was established in 1789, presidents have sent 163 names to the Senate for approval. The Senate has so far approved 125 of them (about 77 percent, though seven have also turned down the appointment).
Some of the nominees have faced a tougher road than others, of course. Roughly 23 percent don't make it. Some of those were outright rejected. Some nominees take their names out of consideration. The Senate didn't even bother to vote on 10 of the presidents' recommendations, most notably that of Merrick Garland who was nominated by President Barack Obama in 2016 toward the end of his second term.
Often, though, the chosen ones breeze through the process. Current Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg won a Senate vote of 96-3 in 1993. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan nominated three judges who were voted onto the bench unanimously, including Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman to serve on the Court, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy.
"It's supposed to be kind of a collaboration. There's an understanding that there's deference paid to the president's nominee," says Jon Michaels, a professor at the UCLA School of Law. "So there has to be something problematic about that nominee not to go forward."
But ... welcome to now. These days, in a politically fractured nation, things aren't nearly as easy. Something problematic is always on hand. Collaboration is a dirty word.
A Republican-led Senate, at odds with President Obama in 2016, sat on Garland's nomination, refusing to even hold a hearing. When President Donald Trump took office in January 2017, and nominated Neil Gorsuch to the bench instead, Gorsuch passed the Republican-led Senate, but just barely, with a 54-45 vote, and only after Republicans changed Senate rules to prevent a Democratic filibuster.
"None of that is good for the health of the court," Michaels says.