Policy Goals to Judicial Legacy: Analyzing Presidential Priorities and Their Judicial Appointments

• In Event: Congress and the Presidency

Abstract

Do presidents appoint judges to uphold and defend key presidential priorities? This paper takes a first step toward identifying key policy priorities and goals of U.S. Presidents to determine if those policy signals impact the decisions of their judicial appointments. Policy priorities and goals are identified from presidential debates during national campaigns and State of the Union Addresses. Following Bonilla’s (2012) method of identifying campaign promises, we use text analysis to identify policy priorities and goals for each elected president. While presidents do not ask judicial nominees outright how they will rule on any particular issue area, the priorities articulated by the president as a candidate and in their State of the Union addresses serve as important signals. The goal of this research is to determine the impact of key presidential priorities and goals on the decisions of judicial appointments. If judicial appointments are more likely to decide cases that align with the policy priorities signaled by the president before their appointments, that provides an important contribution to understanding presidential-judicial relations. It demonstrates how the president views judicial appointments as more than general partisans likely to decide in ways that are ideologically congruent to the president, but rather, as a means to also to defend presidential policy goals and establish a legacy.

Authors

• Michael Thunberg, Norwich University

• Spencer Shane Rada, Norwich University