Scalia Appointment as High Stakes as Clarence Thomas
The last nomination with the ideological stakes so high was in 1991, when Thurgood Marshall retired, by some measures the most liberal justice in modern history. He was replaced by Justice Clarence Thomas, the most conservative by those same measures, after a brutal confirmation process.
“The importance of the change in the court’s jurisprudence that is directly attributable to the choice of Clarence Thomas to fill the vacancy created by Thurgood’s retirement cannot be overstated,” Justice John Paul Stevens, who retired in 2010, wrote in a memoir published in 2011.