Hey, did you guys see this post by John Lott

on the... well, here's the title: Why Judges Aren't Smarter The less sterling a candidate's record, the more likely Congress is to confirm. By John R. Lott, Jr., resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

So politicians don't like smart people. Xenophobia, I guess.

Using the work of legal scholars like Stanford's Lawrence Lessig and the University of Chicago's William Landes, I also looked at measures of quality once a judge was on the bench, including the number of citations to their opinions and the number of published opinions. I found that the more influential the judge, the longer it took him or her to be confirmed. For instance, after accounting for tenure, I found that each 1% increase in citations of a judge's opinions increased the length of the confirmation process for circuit court by 3%. Looking at the data, it appears that fights over nominees such as Robert Bork had much more to do with their influence than their somehow being more extreme than other nominees. Fourth circuit court of appeals judge James Wilkinson is another example of a highly-cited judge who took a long time (273 days) to be confirmed.

How does anybody manage to get nominated in the first place? Oh, silly me, I keep thinking people are advanced according to their merit. We're talking politics, not some rationally run enterprise.