Answer: Judge G. Harrold Carswell. When Richard Nixon nominated Carswell, a Fifth Circuit judge, to fill Abe Fortas’s seat, opponents called his record thin and unearthed a 1948 speech in which he’d endorsed white supremacy. Senator Roman Hruska, tasked with defending him, told a TV interviewer that even if Carswell were mediocre, “there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers” who deserved representation — adding that the Court couldn’t be made up entirely of Brandeises, Frankfurters, and Cardozos. Read more here.
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