Will the GOP senators call her a nasty girl? Some will; some won’t. What we know is that there is strong feeling within the party that she is an affirmative action baby who wouldn’t have been on the short list but for Biden’s highly inappropriate commitment to appoint a black woman to the Court.
Is that fair? No, for three reasons:
- Opinion within the GOP suggests that there is some sort of exam, or game of Legal Jeopardy, which creates a clear and lengthy hierarchy for the purpose of selecting judges. That is not the case; there are literally thousands of people who are qualified for the job (even, arguably, me). Biden was obligated to start with a reasonably large pool of qualified applicants, and to pick someone from it. He did. There is no list with an old white dude with a Harvard Law degree at the top.
- Given that the Supreme Court is increasingly acting as the nation’s final arbiter of racial and culture war issues, rather than a group of dry technicians reviewing tax statutes, it makes perfect sense to try to make it look like America–not just a bunch of conservative white Catholics.
- The GOP, of course, engages in its own identity politics when it gets to choose a new justice. That is exactly why the Court in no way represents the views of America as a whole–just, in the party’s view, the “real America” of wealthy white Christians.
Does the selection of a black female justice make enough of a difference in the eyes of the affected group to justify limiting the field so significantly? I will address that question in my next post.