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This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, December 3rd, 2020. I'm Caleb Brown.

The fight over judicial nominations seems fairly new, but the key turning point was much earlier,

according to Iliaas Shapiro author of Supreme

Disorder judicial nominations and the politics of America's highest court we

discussed the long history of judicial nomination fights and the relatively recent innovation, if you want to call it that, of holding hearings over potential Supreme Court justices.

If there were a version of Schoolhouse Rock for these struggles over whether or not prospective

justices on the US Supreme Court were to be produced. You would think, hey, this person is qualified. We put this

person to a vote. Everyone agrees. This person is qualified. And then they sit on the court and they tell us what the Constitution

means and they otherwise adjudicate cases.

What's wrong with that?

Well, despite John Roberts's protestations at his confirmation hearing,

judges aren't simply computers or even umpires just mechanically applying certain rules.

And in fact, the umpire analogy might work

because different umpires have different strike zones

and all the rest of it

...