Pottersville's Memory Lane: Supreme Court edition

On May 26th, 2009, our nation's first African American president nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, the first hispanic to be so honored. Centrists and progressives seem to applaud the judge's nomination. However, not all presidential nominations to the Supreme Court had started out much less finished so promisingly. Here's a look at some of the most forgettable and regrettable nominations to the Supreme Court:

---

1803 Infuriated and stymied by Marbury vs Madison, President Thomas Jefferson then threatened to fill the next vacancy on the high court with a donkey from his plantation, which ironically later became the genesis for the latter day Democratic Party.

1904 President Teddy Roosevelt nominates the big game hunter who killed those two scary fucking male lions later depicted in The Ghost and the Darkness. The nomination never got out of committee.

1937 Franklin Roosevelt, disgusted by the Supreme Court torpedoing the New Deal, then fired the entire bench and tried to pack it, instead, with the New York Giants football team plus their water boy. The original Supreme Court was, instead, swiftly reinstated by the Senate.

1973 William Rehnquist is nominated by President Richard M. Nixon but only after being told that his original choice, Judge Roy Bean, was dead.

1983 At a birthday party for Barry Goldwater, Bozo the Clown is nominated by President Ronald Reagan, who later unsuccessfully tried to pass it off as a joke that was "suggested by Mommy's astrologer."

2005 President George W. Bush nominates for the Supreme Court Harriet Miers, who wasn't even a judge and was even incapable of filling out questionnaires given to her by the Senate Judiciary Committee.