WI: Powell Memo leaks before confirmation hearings

[Crunch Buttsteak]

In 1971, after Nixon announces his nomination of Lewis Powell Jr. to the Supreme Court, a memorandum written by him on August 23rd in which he railed against the New Left, Ralph Nader, and others as a threat to business.

IOTL this memo leaked much later and underpinned a lot of criticism that Powell as a Justice was too soft on major corporations, and it also formed the basis of the modern right wing.

So what if it leaked earlier? Say, after he had been nominated but before his confirmation?

Does he still get confirmed, or does the controversy cause Nixon to withdraw his nomination in favor of somebody else?

And how does this affect the 1972 election?

 

[overoceans]

Were the New Left and Ralph Nader such esteemed entities in 1971 that there would be significant outrage against someone trashing them in a memo? I'm not sure of the make-up of Judiciary Committee at that time, maybe if it was a liberal Democrat majority, the memo MIGHT tip them against Powell. But I don't think you'd see a lot of pushback from the general public.

I guess there might also have been some sort of expectation, crossing partisan lines, that SCOTUS nominees have a neutral political record, in which case maybe some Republicans would turn against Powell as well. That's about the only thing I could see snafuing the nomination. Other than that, I don't think Joe Blow Middle America is gonna be saying "OMG, this heathen warlock insulted the yippies!"

 

[overoceans]

Here is a copy of the memo.

Something I could see being controversial, especially for a potential judge, is his call for an "evaluation of textbooks", to correct a supposed leftist bias. But when you read his actual proposal, it's that he wants the Chamber Of Commerce to examine the books, and lobby the universities for a more business-friendly perspective. That's not quite the same thing as calling for the government to suppress left-wing opinions on campus.

 

[UCB79]

He would have been confirmed anyway. The
Republican Senators would have been so
determined to get a conservative on the
Supreme Court after Haynsworth & Cars-
well had been rejected they would, IOTL in
1971, have voted for just about ANYONE.
Democrats controlled the Senate then but
enough Democratic Senators would have
crossed the asisle(there weren't THAT many
liberal Democratic senators)to push the nomination through.

 

[Don Draper]

In hindsight the memo gets blown up in importance by people as some kind of secret founding document of neoliberalism or whatever, but I don’t think that was really the case at the time. The memo was super tame compared to what the auto industry tried to do to discredit Nader when he published Unsafe At Any Speed. He’d still get confirmed.