This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, September 22nd, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The President says he will nominate a new justice to the US Supreme Court this week,

now just weeks from the presidential election.

Cato's Ilia Shapiro is author of the new book Supreme Disorder, Judicial Nominations

and the Politics of America's highest court, we spoke yesterday.

In general, what do you think this confirmation battle looks like and give us a sense of

the details and what people are pointing to in terms of trying to say this is

unprecedented or this is perfectly precedent.

Well in the long history of the American Republic there is really little new under the sun.

Politics has been a part of the process from the very beginning.

George Washington himself had a nominee rejected and about half of our

presidents have had trouble of some kind making appointments. The overall

best determinant of whether the nomination is going to be successful is

whether the Senate is controlled by the same party as the presidency. When you

have that united government, we're looking at about 90% confirmation rate.

When you have divided government, we're south of 60 percent and that

difference is accentuated in presidential election years. So it's going to be a

big fight what we have now, but there's examples of pretty much any development and it all comes down to

political power plays.

Well how reasonable do you think it is that the president might nominate and the Senate might vote on somebody some 40 days

before the election.

...