"...it was the former Tildenite, Wheeler H. Peckham, the man most famous in New York for his aggressive prosecution of the Tweed Ring, whom Blaine entrusted as the "tip of the spear" on civil service reform, the first item on his legislative agenda. Even among the ostensibly good-government Liberals there were many who wanted some form of patronage, and beyond Senator George Pendleton the Democrats initially closed ranks against reform in anticipation of when they might some day take power again, refusing to lend a hand to any measure that would go further than the toothless, practically sinecure Civil Service Commission established late in the John Hoffman administration. Peckham's proposal was in fact so radical that even some Liberals balked - he would have cordoned off nearly every appointable position beyond the Cabinet, including the judiciary, with strict rules for appointments and establishing the Civil Offices Board and Judicial Appointments Board to produce lists which the President would be bound to select from. Blaine himself was skeptical that such a program would hold constitutional muster, and upon consulting his friend, Vermont Senator George F. Edmunds, among the most powerful men in the body and who was close with several Supreme Court Justices, he quietly instructed Hay and Evarts to signal to Congress that he opposed the measure.
The next attempt at reform came from Speaker of the House James Garfield, who along with a handful of allies from the Midwest proposed instead a "tiered" system of appointments, where lower-level bureaucratic posts would be professionalized by competitive examination, mid-level offices would be chosen from a "pool of selectmen" who were qualified by a formula of professional experience and examination, and then leave high-level offices to full Presidential appointment. Perhaps most notably, the Garfield Act would leave judges uncovered by the provisions of the reform, thus eliminating some of the thornier constitutional concerns, and leave the determination of the civil service examinations and the "appointment formula" up to a seven-member Civil Service Commission, whose members would serve staggered six-year terms [1]. The Garfield Act passed the House of Representatives in early October 200-125, with all opposition coming from Democrats. In the Senate, meanwhile, Pendleton would propose his own act that gave the Commission broader rule-setting powers in how it determined which positions to cover and left out the tiered system, and perhaps more critically, outlawed "assessments" payable to political parties by appointees [2]. Garfield had left the assessments ban out of his bill out of concern that it would so poison the Act that it would be unpassable, but several Liberals - including Peckham - made it a redline for pressing ahead in the Senate. The Pendleton Act initially covered considerably fewer federal employees as well; the only substantial similarities to what had passed the House were its outlawing on firing, demoting or punishing professional civil servants for political reasons, the use of some form of examination, and genuinely empowering the Civil Service Commission rather than having it serve as an advisory body to the President as it had, with some success, during the Hoffman and Hendricks years.
As the civil service reform effort was bogged down between the competing bills, Blaine's attention fell on other matters - the replacement of the ailing Noah Swayne on the Supreme Court. Swayne, regarded as a judicial mediocrity and the first appointment of President Lincoln to the Court, had initially refused to step down despite being infirm, only wanting to resign on the condition that his friend, Ohio attorney and close friend of former Ohio Governor Rutherford Hayes. Matthews' ties to the railroad industry, in particular financier Jay Gould of "Black Friday" fame, made his appointment an impossibility to the Liberal Party that had run for a decade on "prudency of the public purse" and bristled at accusations it was in hoc to the hated railroad barons. It fell to two unexpected sources to intervene - Treasury Secretary Sherman, an Ohioan, begged Swayne to retire rather than potentially die under a Democratic administration as he nearly had done, and secondly President Lincoln, who traveled to Washington to visit his son Robert as the Thanksgiving holiday approached and, still an imposing and virile figure even at 72 years of age, finally persuaded Swayne to step aside.
The favored choice of Blaine now fell to his friend Senator Edmunds, who had served on the Judiciary Committee of the Senate as both a Republican and Liberal and was dear friends with Chief Justice Davis and Justice Thurman. Edmunds was skeptical to leave the Senate, where he loved debating, and had mulled a Presidential run of his own once Blaine left office, now that a sitting Senator had been elected to the White House for the first time. Blaine, Evarts and Hay spent Thanksgiving in Vermont with Edmunds, persuading him to take the appointment, with Blaine assuring him that he would make him Chief Justice if and when David Davis, who was frequently in poor health and now in his late 60s, left the bench via retirement or death during his term. Edmunds suspected - and was proven right, as Blaine and Hay's private diaries would one day prove - that his appointment to the Court was meant to remove a potential rival for Blaine's proteges to the Presidency, and he oscillated for days before finally accepting the offer [3]. Swayne announced his retirement shortly thereafter, and now two battles would become one in what Hay would later describe as "the Christmas Dispute."
Edmunds had earned himself a number of enemies among Democrats over the years and his record of holding retainers from railroad companies and practicing law during his Senate years, as many of his colleagues did, became an issue. The skepticism of some Liberal reformers towards him also bogged the debate on his nomination down, a shock to Blaine who had expected him to coast through as a Senatorial courtesy. The nomination of Edmunds to the Supreme Court became intertwined with the civil service reform acts, and finally, days before the Christmas recess, Edmunds voted in favor of the Pendleton-Peckham Act, a signal to the more radical reformers that his previous reputation for slow progress or the status quo was perhaps at last melting. With the Senate act passing 32-20, with Edmunds and Senator Hearst of California abstaining, and primarily Liberals and a handful of Democrats in support, the logjam on Edmunds' nomination was broken after two weeks of debate, a considerable amount for that time. Justice George F. Edmunds' nomination was passed 42-10, with only Democrats - including all six former slave state Senators and George Pendleton - in opposition as the last act before the Senate recessed for nearly two months, and he was sworn in by Chief Justice Davis the next day. As for the competing House and Senate bills, that battle would need to wait for the spring..."
- Titan: The Life and Presidency of James G. Blaine
[1] President Garfield of course never lived to pass his vision of civil service reform, and I've never found any indication of what exactly he aspired to pass; here, I invent an idea that would probably suit the inclinations of the Liberals of TTL, where patronage reform is a much more livewire issue after the scandals of the 1870s and it being a raison d'etre for their entire political party
[2] In effect the exact provisions of his OTL bill. Ironically, IOTL leading on patronage reform so angered his colleagues back in Ohio that it effectively ended Senator Pendleton's career. He was an interesting figure, that's for sure, a fire-breathing reactionary in some respects and a canny pragmatist in others
[3] In OTL he refused a similar office to be appointed to SCOTUS