On NRO today is [Ed Whelan's] essay “The Next Supreme Court Vacancy: There’s plenty of room to confirm another strong justice.” Among other things, the essay discusses the long-established Senate practice of affording every Supreme Court nominee an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor and explores the lone exception to that practice over the past 130 years—the broadly bipartisan filibuster in 1968 of Abe Fortas’s nomination as Chief Justice.
In short, the only filibuster of a Senate floor vote on a Supreme Court nomination was not only bipartisan, it was a broad-gauged opposition for the best of reasons. Fortas simply lacked the personal probity for service on the highest court in the land. Our best historian of Supreme Court nominations, Henry Abraham, calls Fortas's behavior "ill-conceived, arrogantly thoughtless, [and] downright stupid," accounting for his downfall as caused in part by his "personal greed." (These quotes are from Abraham's Justices, Presidents, and Senators, coming out in a new edition this fall.) source
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