Page 378 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
Carswell Ends Well
I cannot leave this part of my career, however, without going back to February and March of 1970, when I had been at the firm for a grand total of six months.
A little historical background is necessary here: You’ll recall that I argued in front of Abe Fortas in the finals of the Harlan Fiske Stone Moot Court Competition at Columbia, that Fortas was soon thereafter nominated by President Johnson to become the chief justice upon the resignation of Earl Warren (no causal nexus implied here either), that the Republicans and some conservative Democrats filibustered against the nomination, that Fortas’s nomination failed for want of a two-thirds majority to impose cloture on the debate, and that Fortas was subse- quently compelled to resign from the Supreme Court. The resignation left a vacancy, which President Nixon sought to fill by nominating Clement Haynsworth, a Southerner who sat on the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. The Democrats opposed the Haynsworth nomina- tion, in part as payback for the successful Fortas filibuster (which many had seen as payback for the liberalism of the Earl Warren Court). And the opposition was successful.
Nixon responded by nominating another Southerner: G. Harold Carswell, a Georgian who sat on the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Cir- cuit. Although there was some opposition to this nomination as well, primarily from civil rights groups, few believed that it was politically possible to defeat two consecutive nominations to the Court. Judge Rosenman was one of those few. At some point in March 1970, Ace called me and asked if I wanted to help him out in implementing a plan of the Judge’s to beat back the nomination. There was no way that I wouldn’t want to. The Judge had decided to put together a petition of law school deans and eminent attorneys in private practice throughout the country. I might be delegated a small section to write (I was; it was very small), but my real work was to proofread the petition and help to track the petition-signing process.
• 360 •