I finished Supreme Conflict, by Jan Crawford Greenburg (mentioned here). I was most disturbed by this passage about George W. Bush's first nomination to the Supreme Court:

[Kelley] closely examined opinions for clues on whether a prospective nominee was, as Bush has requested, like Thomas or Scalia. With some, it took one bad opinion to knock them out. Denver-based federal appeals court judge Michael McConnell was a favorite of some conservatives, but he'd written a decision earlier in the spring that would have subjected police officers to sweeping liability for actions while on the job. That was enough for Kelley.