Friday, January 28, 2022

replacing Breyer

Oh, come on. Presidents have been selecting Supreme Court justices to represent specific interests - ethnic groups, religious groups, even particular states or regions - since the beginning of the Republic. Reagan campaigned on the issue of selecting the first woman for the court, and plenty of Justice Barrett's conservative supporters specifically cited her being a woman as a reason for their support.

And, in fact, it's surely good for the court to have a breadth of representation on it. It's fallacious to seek out the single most qualified person, as at the top levels there's many persons of such roughly equal qualifications that other matters, including legal style, views on issues, and, yes, personal background are of greater importance in choosing between them. And since Carter began a systematic campaign for diversity on other levels of the federal bench, enough of those eminently qualified persons are Black women to provide President Biden with a pool to choose from that's as large as previous presidents have used.

Nothing is wrong here. I expect another great Justice of the Court to emerge.

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