President Joe Biden’s Risky Court Pick Isn’t That Risky
Selective memory is alive and well in politics. You can hear it in the predictable howls of protest and gnashing of teeth following President Joe Biden’s promise to — surprise, surprise — name “the first Black woman ever nominated to the Supreme Court.”
Never mind that Republican Ronald Reagan, to name one conservative icon, made a similar demographic outreach in 1980 as he campaigned to unseat Democratic President Jimmy Carter.
A few weeks before Election Day, as some of his rallies were picketed by supporters of the Equal Rights Administration, which he opposed, Reagan promised to name a woman to “one of the first Supreme Court vacancies in my administration.”
He kept that promise by naming Sandra Day O’Connor, then an Arizona judge, to the high court on the recommendation of another conservative Republican icon, Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater.
Yet, judging by the explosion of rage on the right at Biden for similarly sticking by his own promise, you might have thought the Democratic president was, as right-winger Sean Hannity described it on his Fox News show, “bullied into the decision by the new extreme left.”
Right. No way that Biden was thinking for himself?
And even the Grand Old Party’s de facto leader, Donald Trump, pledged to nominate a woman to fill the seat of late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — and fulfilled that pledge with Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Whether you love her views or not, she’s qualified.
And Team Biden released a shortlist of his potential candidates who also seemed, to say the least, quite qualified: Justice Leondra Krueger of the California Supreme Court, U.S. Circuit Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson and U.S. District Judge Michelle Childs.
Even George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who nevertheless lambasted Biden’s promise of a Black female as a possible violation of the high court’s anti-quota standards, acknowledged in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that all three were “worthy candidates.”
But the notion that they have been named only because of a quota, Turley wrote, is “an unfortunate implication for the ultimate nominee.”
...continued
(c) 2022 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
