Opinion: Earth to GOP: All of Biden's top Supreme Court candidates are qualified - Gerson
There is a mythic version of the judicial selection process in which there is one exceptionally gifted candidate — the most qualified nominee — whom a president should choose for the Supreme Court. And nothing else should matter in determining this person other than their professional qualifications and temperament. Any extraneous factors are impurities, pulling an intellectual exercise into the bubbling bog of politics.
Compare this ideal with the recent and effective use of Supreme Court nominations as a political tool. In the summer of 2016, as Donald Trump was securing the Republican nomination for president, he faced skepticism from the judicially conservative about his potential Supreme Court picks. So Trump not only released a list of prospective nominees approved by the Heritage Foundation but also said: “We’re going to have great judges, conservative, all picked by the Federalist Society.” He also issued an updated list 55 days before his reelection loss.
Having made a particularly crass political use of Supreme Court selection, Republicans who criticize President Biden’s narrowing of his first Supreme Court choice to Black women are about to test the public’s tolerance for sanctimonious hypocrisy. In Sen. Roger Wicker’s (R-Miss.) attack, the consideration of race is an instance of “affirmative racial discrimination.” “Would be nice,” tweeted former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, “if Pres Biden chose a Supreme Court nominee who was best qualified without a race/gender litmus test.”
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There is no single person most qualified to serve on the Supreme Court. There is, instead, a category of people we regard as having the background and temperament to be excellent justices. And within those boundaries, every president makes political choices. The real question is: Should presidents preface their announcements of nominees with the polite fiction that the search for a nominee had nothing to do with racial, ethnic or ideological background, even when it manifestly did?
Maybe. But this prevarication strikes me as a strange place to make an ethical stand. Rather, we should ask: Is it generally a good thing when the country’s highest court becomes more diverse in background? Of course it is. For his vigorous assertion of this point, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) deserves credit. “Put me in the camp of making sure the court and other institutions look like America,” the senator said. “You know, we make a real effort as Republicans to recruit women and people of color to make the party look more like America.”
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/31/biden-supreme-court-candidates-are-all-qualified/
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