President Biden has made it clear that he will restrict his pool of Supreme Court candidates to black women only, thus excluding almost 95% of the population from the get-go. How this yields the most qualified possible nominee has yet to be explained; perhaps commenters can give me a clue. I’m assuming here, of course, that Supreme Court qualifications are things like fidelity to the Constitution, legal scholarship, broad experience, fair mindedness and self discipline. What a candidate looks like is decidedly not a qualification for the Court, or probably much of anything beyond making your way in Hollywood.
But enough of what I think. What do the American people think? ABC News polled the question.
The ABC headline is: “Majority of Americans want Biden to consider ‘all possible nominees’ for Supreme Court vacancy.” The first paragraph reads:
A new ABC News/Ipsos poll finds that a plurality of Americans view the Supreme Court as motivated by partisanship, while President Joe Biden’s campaign trail vow to select a Black woman to fill a high-court vacancy without reviewing all potential candidates evokes a sharply negative reaction from voters.
Not that this should come as a surprise.
During the spring 2020 presidential primaries, days before his set of big wins on Super Tuesday, Biden pledged to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, if elected. Now, with the chance to do so, just over three-quarters of Americans (76%) want Biden to consider “all possible nominees.” Just 23% want him to automatically follow through on his history-making commitment that the White House seems keen on seeing through. At a ceremony honoring the retiring justice, Biden told reporters he is able to honor his promise without compromising on quality. (Emphasis added)
Oh, you can preemptively eliminate almost the entire population “without compromising quality.” I wonder what the MSM would be opining if Donald Trump had said that.
Well, actually, I don’t wonder.
Although the poll’s sample size was not large enough to break out results for Black people, only a little more than 1 in 4 nonwhite Americans (28%) wish for Biden to consider only Black women for the vacancy. Democrats are more supportive of Biden’s vow (46%) than Americans as a whole, but still a majority of Democrats (54%) also prefer that Biden consider all possible nominees.
Democrats hope that the nomination will re-engage Democrats, who are sorely in need of a boost in the run-up to what is shaping up to be a very challenging midterm election for the party.
For sure. The primary criterion for selecting Justices should be finding the red meat that will “re-engage” your party. All this legal scholarship and professional standing stuff is baloney.
Still, if this counts as an excuse, President Biden does need to goose the base just now, given that he seems poised to lose Congress in about nine months. The ABC poll showed high disapproval of Biden’s handling of a range of issues, including a couple of interest to followers of this blog.
A glaring weak spot for Biden is inflation, where 69% of Americans disapprove of his handling of this key issue. Speaking in Pittsburgh Friday, Biden acknowledged the crush of inflation, pitching his Build Back Better social spending plan as part of the remedy….
Troublingly for the White House, only 1% of Americans view the state of the nation’s economy as “excellent,”and only 23% say it’s “good.” Three out of four Americans said the state of the economy was “not so good / poor.”
Biden sees other troublesome disapproval numbers surrounding his handling of gun violence (69%), crime (64%), [and] immigration (64%)…
“Gun violence” is liberalspeak for “murder,” which has surged over the past two years of victories for criminal justice “reform” as it has seldom if ever surged before.
Still, if the candidate pool must be shrunken in the way the President insists he will do, I have an idea. Let him nominate Janice Rogers Brown, daughter of sharecropper and former Justice of the California Supreme Court (seven years) and the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (twelve years until her resignation in 2017). Although then-Senator Biden filibustered this brilliant black woman in 2005, I’m sure that, in the name of “bringing the country together” — a goal Mr. Biden has relentlessly told us he seeks — he will now relent. And, as an extra added bonus, Judge Brown actually is qualified for the Supreme Court.
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