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Game Theory Time: SCOTUS Edition
Brian Sandoval, by U.S. Air Force Photo by Airman 1st Class Jason Couillard. Public Domain.
Apparently, Obama is thinking of nominating a Republican:
President Barack Obama said he won’t back down from picking a nominee, a direct challenge to top Senate Republicans who the day before said they won’t hold hearings or meet with any nominee Mr. Obama puts forward. At the same time, people familiar with the matter said the administration is vetting Brian Sandoval, the Republican governor of Nevada, as a possible candidate.
This could be bad:
Mr. Sandoval — who initially on paper would seem hard for many Republicans to refuse — is far from the nomination. But the emergence of his name as a possible contender opens a new window into the administration’s thinking. The White House has already indicated that the president intends to nominate someone who has past Republican support and lacks a significantly liberal background.
The prospect of Obama nominating another Justice Kennedy or a conservative justice raises a number of questions:
- Why now? Obama isn’t exactly known for upholding constitutional norms.
- How does he benefit? Surely the benefits of highlighting GOP “obstructionism” would be far outweighed by the costs of caving on an issue that’s very important to liberal Democrats.
- What are the different possible scenarios of how this could play out?
In the worst case, Obama puts forward a conservative justice who writes mostly conservative opinions, but won’t overturn past liberal precedents, thus greatly reducing the chances of American structural reform happening before we hit the economic and political crises projected to start in the 2020s.
For example, one can imagine a scenario where SCOTUS strikes down, say, the Wagner Act, and forces even a President Hillary Clinton to embrace sensible labor market reform. On the other hand, the chances of Clinton ever signing a formal repeal of the Wagner Act are pretty much zero.
Published in General
The last time I remember an elected official nominated to the Supreme Court was another western Republican governor named Earl Warren.
I think you’re making the mistake of conflating unions with adversarial collective bargaining. A more participatory, non-adversarial and, yes, employer-dominated system could work. Like you said, there really aren’t free rents for adversarial unions to capture in a free market (or in a regulated one; but that’s another discussion). Thus, the only way to raise worker standards of living is to increase productivity.
Adversarial unions can’t do that, but surely more cooperative ones could.