Just three Republican senators have declared their intent to vote in favor of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, completing a slide toward extreme partisanship on Supreme Court confirmations that began during George W. Bush’s presidency.
In recent days, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney have announced they will support Jackson’s nomination, drawing the ire from some fellow Republicans. That level of support is in line with the limited number of Democrats who voted to confirm Donald Trump’s three nominees to the court.
But through the 1990s, it was more common for the opposition party to back nominees. That pattern began to shift in 2005, when only half of Democratic senators voted to confirm John Roberts as chief justice.
Three of the four justices appointed prior to Roberts each received the support of at least three-quarters of the sitting president’s opposing party. Ruth Bader Ginsburg established the high-water mark in 1993, when 93 percent of Republicans voted to confirm her.
The outlier during that era was Clarence Thomas, who received just 19 percent of Democratic support following contentious confirmation hearings in which he was accused of sexual harassment. In fact, the 52 total votes in his favor were the fewest for a confirmed nominee since Sherman Minton garnered just 48 votes (but was opposed by only 16 senators).
Despite the acrimony in the Thomas confirmation, Republicans continued to generally support Democratic nominees, backing Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer during Bill Clinton’s presidency.
But then things began to change. After Roberts was supported by half of Democratic senators, Samuel Alito performed even worse in 2006, getting just four votes from the Democrats.
Republicans returned the favor during Barack Obama’s administration, providing limited support for Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
Polarization has hit a new low since the Trump presidency, with barely any Democrats supporting Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh when they were nominated, and zero Democrats voting for Amy Coney Barrett in 2020.
“Increasingly partisan confirmation fights are another manifestation of more polarized parties. Starting in the late 1970s, the two parties began sorting themselves ideologically," said Keith Allred, executive director of the National Institute for Civic Discourse. "Without the mix of conservatives, moderates and liberals that used to be in each party, both parties are now more beholden to the most extreme views of their most fervent members. Presidents feel more pressure to nominate judges who will please their base and senators in the opposing party have greater incentives to please their base with more strident opposition.”
Jennifer McCoy, a professor political science at Georgia State University, agreed with Allred's assessment that confirmation voters reflect broader polarization.
"Unfortunately this pattern in confirmations follows the general of pernicious polarization in the U.S., by which I mean that the society is divided into two mutually distrustful and immoveable blocs, in an Us vs Them contest with zero-sum views," she said. "Because Republicans, as the minority party at the moment in the Senate, view any win for the Democrats or for President Biden as a loss for them, they seek to deny those wins. This produces a politics of obstruction, rather than solving problems."
McCoy further explained that structural changes are needed to reverse this slide into polarization.
"I believe we need institutional change, particularly to break the rigid binary party system holding democracy hostage in the U.S.," she said. "Reforms to increase voter choice and representation, such as ranked-choice voting with multimember districts, could begin to attenuate the vicious logic of pernicious polarization."
Allred, on the other hand, believes bipartisan cooperation can help heal the divide.
“Going forward, presidents and the most moderate senators in the opposing party will need to work together even more to nominate individuals who can attract bipartisan support and then confirm them if we’re to have more dignified and substantive confirmations than we’re currently seeing,” he said.
No Supreme Court nominee has been rejected by the Senate since Robert Bork in 1987, Harriet Miers asked George W. Bush to pull her nomination in 2005 (leading to Alito being put forward). And Obama’s final nominee, Merrick Garland was never considered by the Republican-controlled Senate – perhaps further poisoning any hope of bipartisan support for future nominees.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.