Reagan, Ronald

Reagan, Ronald (b. Tampico, Ill., 6 Feb. 1911; d. Los Angeles, 5 June 2004; interred Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, Calif.), governor of California, 1967–1974, and president of the United States, 1981–1989. Ronald Reagan was inaugurated fortieth president of the United States in January 1981 and was reelected in November 1984. He was the first president to serve two complete terms since Dwight Eisenhower. During his tenure, Reagan pulled together a coalition of conservatives and libertarians who were dedicated to promoting what they dubbed the Reagan Revolution, an attempt to restructure American politics, law, and economics. The core of this effort was Reagan's of‐trepeated desire to reduce the role of government in American life.

When Reagan won the presidency, he promised to effect great change in many areas. One of the most important was that of changing the direction of the federal courts generally and the Supreme Court in particular. To Reagan's way of thinking, the judiciary, inspired by the liberalism of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, had moved beyond merely exercising judgment and had begun to make policy. Part of Reagan's pledge to get the government off the backs of the people included returning the courts to what he deemed their proper and limited constitutional roles.

The means to this end lay in the power of the president to nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to appoint the federal judges. Reagan took this power seriously and set about to appoint to the federal courts only those who shared his philosophy of judicial restraint (see Selection of Justices). By the time he finished his second term Reagan had, to a great extent, delivered on his campaign promise to redirect the courts.

During his two terms President Reagan appointed 372 of the 736 Article III judges on the federal courts. This included 290 judges on the district courts; 78 on the courts of appeal; and four justices to the Supreme Court. At the end of his tenure 346—some 47 percent of the federal judiciary—were still in active service.

Reagan's effort to transform the federal judiciary through his appointments began to draw heavy political fire. The Department of Justice became the focus of attention for Reagan's critics on the issue of the courts. Under his first attorney general, William French Smith, and especially later during the second term under Smith's replacement, Edwin Meese III, the Department of Justice went about the business of picking judges with a precision never before seen. The newly created Office of Legal Policy screened potential nominees with great care in an effort to fulfill the president's wish to have on the bench those who shared his views on the nature and extent of judicial power.

As Reagan's tenure wore on, the politics of judicial selection became more heated. While there were controversies over particular nominees at all levels, the primary concern was over the Supreme Court. When Justice Potter Stewart retired in 1982, the politically shrewd Reagan sidestepped any real controversy by nominating a largely unknown state judge from Arizona, Sandra Day O'Connor, making her the first woman ever to sit on the Supreme Court.

In 1985, when Chief Justice Warren Burger announced his retirement, the political path to the Court had become tougher to traverse. Reagan's nomination of Justice William Rehnquist, the most outspoken judicial conservative then on the Court, had drawn a great deal of political opposition. Ironically, the more conservative Antonin Scalia, then a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, who was named to replace Rehnquist as associate justice, was overwhelmingly approved by the Senate. Much was made of the fact that he was the first Italian‐American ever to sit on the high court.

With three nominees in place it was inevitable that any other vacancies would generate ever more heated opposition. This was made clear when the centrist Justice Lewis Powell resigned in 1987 and Reagan nominated Judge Robert H. Bork to take his seat. Bork was the best‐known conservative judge then sitting on the federal courts. Despite his public service as both a federal judge and solicitor general of the United States, his distinguished career as a professor at Yale Law School, and his experience in private practice, he was decisively denied confirmation after a bruising confirmation hearing.

After Reagan's next nominee, Judge Douglas Ginsburg, withdrew following disclosures that as a Harvard law professor he had smoked marijuana, Reagan finally replaced Powell with Judge Anthony Kennedy, then sitting on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. By the end of Justice Kennedy's second term on the Court, it seemed clear that Reagan had indeed succeeded in shifting the direction of the Supreme Court. Although the shift was not as pronounced as the President might have wished, there was a difference with the Reagan justices in place.

Reagan had the greatest influence on the Supreme Court—both as to the actions of the Court and its place in the broader political context—of any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Not only because of his appointments to the Supreme Court but also because of his lower court appointments, the contours of American law have been changed. The kinds of cases and their attendant opinions that now go before the Supreme Court on appeal also bear the mark of judges who share Reagan's vision of judicial power under the Constitution. As had President Roosevelt a half‐century earlier, President Reagan dramatically demonstrated that a president's most powerful legacy can be the judges he appoints to the federal courts.

See also Judicial Activism; Judicial Self‐Restraint; Nominations, Controversial.

Bibliography

Robert H. Bork , The Tempting of America; The Political Seduction of the Law (1989).
Terry Eastland , Taking the Presidency Seriously (1991).

Gary L. McDowell