The call from the President to become a Supreme Court Justice is a hard offer to refuse. But not everyone in history has accepted it. Here's a look at four famous cases where prominent people passed on joining the most-powerful court in the land.
Patrick Henry
The revolutionary firebrand apparently was offered the position of Chief Justice of the United States in late 1795 after John Jay resigned and John Rutledge failed as a recess appointment. Letters from Light Horse Harry Lee to Henry indicated an offer was coming from President Washington to serve on the Court. Henry didn’t respond for several weeks, leading Washington to call the incident “embarrassing in the extreme” to Lee in a separate letter. Henry had already declined the position of Secretary of State and he didn’t wind up as Chief Justice when Oliver Ellsworth was confirmed instead.
Thomas Dewey
The two-time Republican nominee for President (in 1944 and 1948) was reportedly considered for the Supreme Court by Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson, turning down both their offers to join the Court. According to the New York Times obituary for Earl Warren, Eisenhower offered the Chief Justice position in 1953 to John Foster Dulles and Dewey first, and both men declined. Warren then accepted. A decade later, Johnson reportedly offered Dewey a Supreme Court seat after Dewey didn’t support Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, and Dewey declined again.
Howard Baker
Senator Baker was a Majority Leader and White House Chief of Staff, but Baker also had a chance to join the Supreme Court in 1971 at the request of President Richard Nixon. Baker had been an attorney in Tennessee before winning a 1966 U.S. Senate election there. Five years later, President Nixon made Baker his first choice for one of two positions on the Court, as a replacement for Hugo Black or John Marshall Harlan.
According to John Dean, also of Watergate notoriety, Baker paused about accepting the appointment as he weighed the financial aspects of a Supreme Court position. Nixon moved on to William Rehnquist as Baker’s replacement as Baker delayed. But it was then Baker in 1973, as a Senator at the Watergate hearings, who asked Dean the famous question, “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”
Mario Cuomo
The former presidential candidate and New York Governor was openly mentioned by Bill Clinton as a possible Supreme Court Justice when Clinton was a presidential candidate. A year later, Cuomo released a statement to Clinton and the public about his Supreme Court aspirations. “I do not know whether you might indeed have nominated me, but because there has been public speculation ... I think I owe it to you to make clear now that I do not wish to be considered,” Cuomo said.
In 2012, Clinton confirmed that he had made the offer to Cuomo while he was President. And in a prior book, George Stephanopoulos said a deal was within minutes of being struck when Cuomo changed his mind about the nomination in 1993. Instead, Ruth Bader Ginsburg received the call from the White House.
