Ketanji Brown Jackson Supreme Court Confirmation: Live Updates

The increasing partisanship surrounding Supreme Court confirmations is prompting difficult questions about the handling of future nominees and whether the pick of a president of one party could ever win approval in a Senate controlled by the other.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader who blocked President Barack Obama’s nominee for almost a year in 2016, refused to say on Tuesday whether he would allow consideration of a Supreme Court pick by President Biden in 2023 if he were the majority leader. And that is not even an election year.

“I’m not going to go forward with any prediction on what our strategy might be should we become a majority,” Mr. McConnell said.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, said on Monday that the panel would not have taken up the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson if Republicans had been in control because of her perceived liberal leanings.

“When we are in charge, then we’ll talk about judges differently,” he warned Democrats.

A Republican-led Judiciary Committee could bottle up a Biden nominee on its own. All 11 Republicans on the panel voted on Monday against the nomination of Judge Jackson, forcing Democrats to force it out of committee with a floor vote, a maneuver that they would have been unlikely to pull off had they been in the minority.

In the past, Democratic leaders of the committee have been willing to send Supreme Court nominees chosen by Republican presidents to the floor without a recommendation, or with a negative one, to at least allow them to receive a full Senate vote. But Judge Jackson’s experience shows that Republicans might not extend the same treatment to a Democrat’s nominee.

The intense polarization is an inevitable result of the tit-for-tat that the parties have engaged in over judicial nominees for decades, reaching the point where Supreme Court nominees might be assured of only consideration and approval when the president’s party controls the Senate.

The inability to advance nominees could easily extend to the lower courts as well. Mr. Obama had to greatly reduce efforts to seat federal district court and appellate judges once Republicans won the Senate in 2014, and Republicans would no doubt slow down Mr. Biden if they took power.

It is a huge shift from decades of Senate tradition, when members of both parties routinely voted for Supreme Court nominations by the president of the other party.

As recently as 2009, Justice Sonia Sotomayor received nine Republican votes; in 2010, Justice Elana Kagan received the support of five Republicans.

Then, in 2016, Judge Merrick B. Garland did not even receive a hearing as an Obama Supreme Court nominee sent to a Republican-controlled Senate. The next three nominees — Justices Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — have all been narrowly confirmed, with Justice Gorsuch receiving three Democratic votes, Justice Kavanaugh one and Justice Barrett none. Judge Jackson is expected to win three Republican votes.

Though it was touch-and-go in rounding up that many, it should be considered significant given the current climate.

In any event, a Republican-controlled Senate would force the Biden administration to send judicial nominees at all levels who would be much more acceptable to the G.O.P., potentially dropping or moderating its emphasis on nominating civil rights lawyers and former public defenders such as Judge Jackson. Most Republicans have opposed nearly all of them.

To have a chance to fill another Supreme Court vacancy, Mr. Biden would have to identify a candidate who could draw significant Republican support, which could prove a tall order. Judge Garland was chosen in 2016 specifically because Republicans had previously said they could support him or a nominee like him.

But when it came time to do so, and Republicans held the Judiciary Committee gavel, Judge Garland — the last Supreme Court nominee picked by a president whose party did not control the Senate — went nowhere.