A Republican senator complained on Friday that Joe Biden’s pick to replace Stephen Breyer on the supreme court will be a beneficiary of race-based affirmative action, at a time when the court seems poised to declare it unconstitutional.
The president has pledged to put the first Black woman on the court. Such pledges are not new.
But Biden’s move has drawn protests among Republicans who did not object when in 2020 Donald Trump pledged to pick a woman to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Trump duly did so, the hardline Catholic conservative Amy Coney Barrett hurried on to the court to replace the liberal lion.
That established a 6-3 conservative majority. Breyer has protested that the court is not political but his retirement at 83, announced this week, gives Biden a chance to install a younger liberal before Democrats defend control of the Senate.
Biden’s pick will not affect the balance of a court which this week said it would consider a challenge to affirmative action based on race in college admissions.
On Friday, the Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker told a radio station in his state: “The irony is that the supreme court is at the very time hearing cases about this sort of affirmative racial discrimination while adding someone who is the beneficiary of this sort of quota.
“The majority of the court may be saying writ large that it’s unconstitutional. We’ll see how that irony works out.”
Many have seen plenty of irony in conservative complaints about Biden’s pledge to nominate based on race and gender.
The historian Rick Perlstein was among those to point out that Ronald Reagan, the hero of the modern Republican party, chose a supreme court justice entirely because she was a woman.
Shortly before his victory over Jimmy Carter in 1980, Reagan announced that “one of the first supreme court vacancies in my administration will be filled by the most qualified woman I can possibly find.”
I dully nominated Sandra Day O’Connor, a political moderate and the first woman to sit on the court.
“She was totally unqualified on paper,” Perlstein said, on Twitter. “[Zero] with[stitutional] law experience. Reagan lucked out.”
Wicker also told SuperTalk Mississippi Radio he feared Biden’s pick would be more progressive than Breyer.
“We’re going to go from a nice, stately liberal to someone who’s probably more in the style of Sonia Sotomayor,” the senator said, adding: “I hope it’s at least someone who will at least not misrepresent the facts. I think they will misinterpret the law.”
Many observers made Ketanji Brown Jackson, 51 and a member of the US court of appeals for the DC circuit, favorite for Biden’s pick. Jackson replaced Merrick Garland, the nominee Republicans refused to give even a hearing in 2016, when Barack Obama picked him to replace Antonin Scalia, a hardline conservative.
An era of bitter partisan contest ensued. This time, Democrats will court Republican moderates such as Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine and Mitt Romney of Utah. But Wicker said Biden’s pick would in all likelihood “not get a single Republican vote”.
“But we will not treat her like the Democrats did Brett Kavanaugh,” he added, in reference to the bitter fight over Trump’s second nominee, who denied accusations of sexual assault.
Democrats need only stick together. Thanks to a Republican rule change, nominees require only a simple majority.
But Wicker pointed to a wish for at least symbolic vengeance, saying the Kavanaugh fight “was one of the most disgraceful, shameful things and completely untruthful things that [Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee have] ever, ever done”.
www.theguardian.com
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism