Tweeting Advice and Consent?: How Congress Talks About Supreme Court Nominations and Legitimacy Online

Objective Supreme Court nominations are highly salient events where the public pays attention to the confirmation hearing of a new justice. This article examines how senators use this moment to communicate about the court and its legitimacy. Methods Using a mixed‐methods approach, I examine both the qualitative data associated with all tweets from sitting senators during the Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson hearings and the tweets themselves in regression analysis to identify the political and institutional factors associated with legitimacy communication. I hand‐code over 2000 tweets on four dimensions related to process legitimacy communication and nominee legitimacy. Results Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee lead the communication process, tweeting about the confirmation itself and about the legitimacy of the process and the candidate more than their peers. When senators are copartisans with the nominee, they tweet more about the confirmation and feature positive legitimacy communication about the process and the nominee. Conclusion Senators play an important role in shaping public opinion about the Supreme Court, particularly by communicating about the legitimacy of the process and the nominee themselves. This breaks down across partisan lines, meaning that positive legitimacy communication is conditional on being a copartisan with the nominee.