Hoover’s election year pick

There's been much bickering lately over presidents and precedents.

Should presidents be permitted to nominate justices to the U.S. Supreme Court with a national election looming? Democrats and Republicans disagree. Surprise.

But a knowledgeable reader, Mitchell Levin of Cedar Rapids, points out there is an interesting Iowa connection to this debate. Isn't there always?

Levin called my attention to President Herbert Hoover's nomination of Benjamin Cardozo to fill a Supreme Court vacancy after famed liberal justice Oliver Wendell Homes Jr. retired. The lone Iowan ever elected president made his selection 84 years ago this week, on Feb. 15, 1932, facing a tough re-election campaign.

It's a fascinating moment, and shows how much court politics has changed. Hoover, a conservative Midwestern Republican, nominated Cardoza, a liberal, Northeastern Democratic Jew, to a slot on the highest court. The pick of the 62-year-old Cardozo tipped the court's balance toward the Northeast and gave it its second Jewish justice.

'In short, politics, philosophy, geography, religion and age, as well as social and personal factors, all weighted heavily against the New Yorker's nomination,” Ira Carmen wrote in a Virginia Law Review article in 1969.

But Cardozo was a renowned and nationally respected legal mind. 'Strangely enough, the fact that Cardozo was Jewish was not a source for opposition,” wrote Levin, who publishes the blog 'This Day … In Jewish History.”

The Republican Senate approved Cardozo's nomination unanimously, and by March 1, he was on the High Court.

Sure, it's not a perfect comparison to President Barack Obama's situation following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. Obama's not on the ballot this fall. Partisan divisions weren't on steroids. Cardoza was an exceptional nominee who transcended politics. Hoover's pick would go on to support Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

'The prophet and the martyr do not see the hooting throng. Their eyes are fixed on the eternities,” Cardozo wrote in a 1931 essay.

That hooting throng brings us back to 2016.

U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley was in Iowa Tuesday facing questions about his insistence that the Judiciary Committee he chairs and the Republican-controlled Senate should not consider any Obama nominee to fill Scalia's post.

In a morning call with Iowa reporters, he seemed to soften his stance, suggesting hearings were possible. Later, at a town hall in Marengo, the senator was largely back on message, contending the pick should be the next president's to make. He said he'd proceed 'a step at a time,” but didn't share his destination.

Truth is, the politics are as clear as they are uncomfortable for Republicans, such as Grassley, who know obstruction carries risks. Allowing Obama to nominate a replacement for Scalia would set the GOP base ablaze. And at a time when both parties rely desperately on their core bases of support to win tight national elections, Grassley knows the perils of compromise.

But he also knows a lot of Iowans want him to do his job and follow the Constitutional process. He's caught between the right thing to do and the hooting throng, all eyes fixed on November.

l Comments: (319) 398-8452; todd.dorman@thegazette.com