WASHINGTON — In August 1986, Antonin Scalia sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee as President Ronald Reagan's nominee to the Supreme Court and faced a pointed question from Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts: would Scalia, if confirmed, vote to overturn Roe v. Wade? Scalia's answer — "I have no agenda" — became one of the more consequential deflections in the history of Supreme Court confirmation hearings.
The exchange captured a ritual that has defined judicial confirmations ever since. Kennedy, already a senior Democrat and the most prominent liberal voice on the committee, pressed Scalia specifically on abortion precedent. Scalia declined to preview how he would rule on any case that might come before the Court, a posture nominees of both parties have adopted in every confirmation since.
Scalia was confirmed 98-0 by the full Senate — a unanimous vote that would be impossible to imagine today, where confirmation battles routinely split along party lines. He was 50 years old at the time and would go on to serve nearly 30 years on the Court, dying in Feb. 2016 at age 79.
The seat Scalia sought in 1986 was that of Associate Justice William Rehnquist, who was simultaneously being elevated to chief justice. Reagan nominated both men on the same day, and the Judiciary Committee considered them together. Rehnquist faced far more contentious questioning over his record on civil rights; Scalia, by contrast, drew modest opposition despite his sharp originalist views.
Kennedy's 1986 questioning of Scalia on Roe proved prescient, but the confirmation hearing produced no movement on the underlying question. Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, stood for another 36 years after Scalia joined the Court. Scalia consistently signaled in opinions and public remarks that he believed Roe was wrongly decided and that the question of abortion belonged to state legislatures, not federal courts — but he never had the five votes necessary to overturn it during his lifetime.
The reversal Kennedy feared in 1986 finally arrived in June 2022, six years after Scalia's death, when the Court issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. The 6-3 majority in Dobbs — written by Justice Samuel Alito — held that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion and returned the question to individual states. Three of the six justices in that majority — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — were appointed by President Trump during his first term.
Scalia's originalist philosophy, which holds that the Constitution should be interpreted according to the meaning understood at the time of its ratification, provided the intellectual framework Alito drew on in Dobbs. Alito's majority opinion cited the absence of any historical tradition protecting abortion rights as central to its reasoning — precisely the analytical method Scalia spent decades advocating from the bench and in public lectures.
The 1986 confirmation exchange illustrates how the abortion question has functioned in Senate confirmation hearings for four decades: nominees decline to preview rulings, senators press anyway, and the hearing produces no binding commitment. After Robert Bork's failed 1987 nomination — in which Bork's detailed answers about constitutional philosophy contributed to his 42-58 rejection — nominees across administrations adopted the Scalia model of declining to address cases that might come before the Court.
Kennedy himself voted against Bork the following year and became associated with the term "Borking" — the aggressive use of a nominee's judicial record and writings to build public opposition before a floor vote. That strategy, which failed against Scalia but succeeded against Bork, set the template for confirmation fights that followed, including the battles over Clarence Thomas in 1991, Samuel Alito in 2006, and all three of Trump's first-term nominees.
The C-SPAN footage of Kennedy's 1986 exchange with Scalia circulates periodically as a historical marker precisely because the outcome — Dobbs in 2022 — took so long to arrive. Kennedy died in August 2009, 13 years before the ruling he was trying to prevent. Scalia died in 2016, also before it. The two men whose exchange defined the abortion debate in that hearing room never lived to see its resolution.
Dobbs eliminated the federal constitutional floor Roe had established and immediately triggered abortion bans or severe restrictions in roughly half the states. As of 2026, the question remains one of the most contested in American electoral politics, appearing on state ballots and in federal legislative debates over whether Congress should codify either a national right or a national restriction. The 40-year arc from Scalia's confirmation to the present tracks the slow, procedural grind through which a single Senate hearing — and a single seat — reshapes the law for generations.
