With Sandra Day O’Connor retiring, everyone is freaking out about how George W. Bush gets to appoint a new Supreme Court Justice. But c’mon people, it’s about time we get a new justice. The last one chosen was in 1994–nine years ago! The only longest appointment drought was from 1812-1823–eleven years.
Plus George W. Bush is the only two-term president who hasn’t made a court appiontment yet. There’s only been four presidents who have not made a Supreme Court appointment:
- William H. Harrison who was president for less than one month.
- Zachary Taylor who was president for only two years
- Andrew Johnson who got shafted by Congress who lowered the number of Justices in 1866 and 1867 so he couldn’t appoint any
- Jimmy Carter who just had bad luck
Here’s graph featuring the complete listing of all the associate and chief justices on the Supreme Court of America. Click to view a chart of U.S. Supreme Court Justic appointments
Sources:
ï U.S. Supreme Court Justices on MSN Encarta
ï Presidents of the United States on whitehouse.gov
ï Supreme Court on wikipedia.
Wow. That is some heavy-duty stuff there, Matt. Nice!
BTW, what software did you use to create the graph?
The graph was created in Adobe Illustrator CS. With some help sorting the data in AppleWorks, Filemaker, and BBEdit.
President Bush chose federal appeals court judge John G. Roberts Jr. as his first nominee for the Supreme Court, selecting a rock-solid conservative who has won broad support from both parties but still faces what could be a contentious battle over the direction of the nation’s highest court.
We’ll see how John Roberts does…
Concerning the wrongful deaths of my children on April 6th, 2006 the appeal went before the U.S. Supreme Court who ordered in my behalf! The U.S. Supreme Court gave me a formal apology concerning their wrongful deaths and ordered that the state in which I reside Ohio’s Governor Ted Strickland and the City Mayor of Cincinnati where I live and the incident occurred were to give me a public apology for the insane massacre of my children also I was to be awarded by the state – $1 billion dollars per child! This decision was rendered on October 16th, 2006 and has been ignored by the State of Ohio!
Thanks for sharing an amazing amount of research and effort. Much appreciated.