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.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.