Biden's Supreme Court promise stirs controversy over race

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Biden's Supreme Court promise stirs controversy over race

January 31, 2022

Stephen Collinson and Shelby Rose

Double standards

A total of 115 justices have served on the US Supreme Court, but only three people of color have made it to that lofty bench.

President Joe Biden's vow to nominate the first Black Woman to the high court promises a moment of history but has also struck an ugly seam. The fact that it has taken this long is a commentary on America's racial history. And some Republicans and conservative media pundits agree that Biden's pick will make a statement about discrimination — but are effectively arguing it will be racially prejudiced against everyone else. Several have warned that Biden's criteria means that the most qualified person for the job will miss out. This is deeply insulting to the Harvard and Yale Law-educated judges, civil rights attorneys and professors on Biden's list. By education and experience, many are equally if not more qualified than some justices already on the bench.

Republican Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi suggested on Friday that any Black woman who reaches the court would be a beneficiary of affirmative action — rules designed to redress historic discrimination against minority Americans, women, the disabled and others in education and the workforce. "The irony is that the Supreme Court is at the very same time hearing cases about this sort of affirmative racial discrimination while adding someone who is the beneficiary of this sort of quota," Wicker said on a radio station in his state. His use of the word "quota" implied that no Black woman would currently be qualified on her own merits. And the idea that a judge's previous life experience or beliefs should disqualify them from the bench is a slippery slope. Recent conservative nominees all appear to have been selected partly because of their opposition to abortion — and the court is even now attacking precedent that guarantees a constitutional right to the procedure.

Conservative media blowhards didn't complain when ex-President Donald Trump, who was hurting with female voters, specifically said he would choose a woman, now-Justice Amy Coney Barrett, to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And former President Ronald Reagan, a conservative hero before the GOP became a Trump personality cult, campaigned on nominating the first woman — who turned out to be Justice Sandra Day O'Connor — to the court.

After generations of discrimination, Reagan had a limited pool of nominees at the top echelons of the law to choose from. Forty years later, Biden has a far deeper bench of brilliant jurists to consider.

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Thanks for reading.

On Monday, President Joe Biden meets with Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, emir of Qatar, at the White House. South Africa's former President Jacob Zuma is back in court for a pretrial hearing. Chinese around the world celebrate the beginning of the Lunar New Year.