It took nearly three months for the Senate to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, after what seemed like endless debates, televised hearings and an FBI investigation, that left many emotionally drained.
But there’s danger in trying to do these things too quickly. In the old days, confirmations were wham-bam affairs, especially when the nominee was a member of the Senate itself, an old boys’ club if there ever was one. Back in 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt nominated U.S. Sen Hugo Black to the highest of courts on Aug. 12, and he was confirmed easily five days later.
However, within days, Ray Sprigle, an investigative reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, turned up something that stunned the White House: Black was a life member of the Ku Klux Klan!
The reaction was explosive, with many calls for him to resign or be impeached. Black tried to stay aloof, but FDR insisted he give a public speech explaining himself. Eventually, he did, in tones much less incendiary than Kavanaugh’s rant eighty-one years later.
The new justice said he had left the Klan after he had been elected to the Senate. “I have had nothing to do with it since that time,” he said, and the controversy soon died down.
The reporter who exposed him won the Pulitzer Prize. Ironically, Black went on to become one of the court’s most liberal justices, including on civil rights.
But if he’d had to face another week of deliberation over his own fate, he never would have made it to the court.
