The Unbearable Whiteness Of Being MAGA And Fox News

President Joe Biden is going to fulfill his pledge to put an African-American female jurist on the Supreme Court – just as Republican Ronnie Reagan promised to put a white woman on the Supreme Court (Sandra Day O’Connor), and Republican Donald Trump promised to put a white woman on the Supreme Court (Amy Coney Barrett) who would not just overturn Roe v Wade but “own the libs” by replacing women’s rights icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Did you catch the critcal distinction? “White.”

Cue the Fox propaganda outrage machine: it took all of 10 seconds before the Fox propagandists started screaming that this is an “affirmative action” hire, as if an African-American female jurist by definition is not quaified, not so subtly insinuating that an African-Amercan woman could not possibly be the most qualified individual for the court over a white man.

You want to talk about an “affirmative action” hire? How about a “wingnut welfare” appointment to the Supreme Court – Clarence Thomas, who was only appointed to the Supreme Court to “own the libs” by replacing civil rights icon and super-lawyer, Thurgood Marshall. The Case For Impeaching Clarence Thomas: “Given the evidence that’s come out in the years since [Anita Hill’s testimony], it’s also time to raise the possibility of impeachment.” To use an old sports metaphor, Clarence Thomas wasn’t fit to carry the jock strap of Thurgood Marshall. He has not grown into the job he did not deserve nor improved over time. He has only become worse. Now he takes orders at the drive-thru window from his MAGA insurrectionist wife and her clients with business before the court on how to vote. Is Ginni Thomas a Threat to the Supreme Court?

Paul Waldman of the Washington Post writes, The race-baiting response to Biden’s Supreme Court pledge:

One hundred and fifteen Americans have sat on the Supreme Court. Of those, 110 have been men and 112 have been White. But now that President Biden has the chance to follow through on the promise he made to appoint a Black woman to serve on the court, conservatives are aghast at the very thought.

Not all of them, of course; some Republicans are staying mum for now, and they may ultimately decide to say the nominee is a crazy communist and leave it at that. But ever since we heard Justice Stephen G. Breyer will retire, a flood of reactions from the right has been based on the premise that appointing a Black woman to the court necessarily means she will be elevated over someone more qualified, presumably a White man.

That is quite simply a racist presumption. Saying so will raise some hackles; conservatives are convinced that they are constantly being unfairly accused of racism by liberals.

[So] it’s important to be clear about what I am, and am not, arguing. In assessing racism, I try to stick to the “what you said, not who you are” standard. With the occasional exception, we can judge a statement racist without peering into the heart of the speaker, which ends up sucking us into distractions about how many Black friends someone has.

Let’s consider some of what’s circulating on the right. On Fox News, Gregg Jarrett said Biden is violating the Civil Rights Act by promising to appoint a Black woman (and no, a Supreme Court appointment is not like an ordinary job opening). Sean Hannity claimed Biden’s pledge “may even be illegal.” Someone is clearly being discriminated against here, and it’s White people.

Conservative legal scholar Ilya Shapiro tweeted that rather than picking a male candidate Shapiro judged to be the “objectively best pick,” Biden would succumb to the “latest intersectional hierarchy” and choose a “lesser black woman.” (He later deleted the tweet and apologized.) [Apology not accepted.]

Meanwhile, [Rupert Murdoch’s] Wall Street Journal editorial page said choosing a Black woman “elevates skin color over qualifications,” as though it would be impossible to find a Black woman who is also qualified. “I mean, what kind of a qualification is that, being a Black woman?” asked Fox News’s [Trump Fluffer] Maria Bartiromo.

“They can overtly discriminate against people,” lamented Ben Shapiro. [White Power Hour host] Tucker Carlson issued a nearly 10-minute rant about the injustice of it all, concluding with the suggestion that George Floyd’s sister should be the nominee.

“She is not a judge or a lawyer or whatever, but in this case, who cares?” Carlson said. “Clearly, that’s not the point anymore.”

So what’s racist about this? Aren’t they just advocating for equality?

Think about the assumption behind these objections: That if Biden promised to choose a Black woman and then did, whoever she is, that means she must be unqualified if her race were part of the reason she was chosen, or at the very least less qualified than someone who isn’t a Black woman. Why would that be?

They look at someone such as reported leading contender Ketanji Brown Jackson — national oratory champion in high school, magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University, editor of the Harvard Law Review, Supreme Court clerk, experience as a trial and appeals court judge — and say there must be better candidates, if only Biden were open-minded enough to consider them.

Really? Like whom?

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is eminently more qualified than all of the TV lawyer talking heads on Fox News, combined. Yet the good judge was confirmed by the Senate for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals just last year, on a vote of 53-44, with only Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voting with Democrats in favor of confirmation. Senate votes to confirm key Biden judicial nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson. The unbearable whiteness of being MAGA would not allow the other radical Republicans to vote to confirm, out of fear of retribution from the propagandists at Fox News and the radical white nationalst MAGA base.

Here’s the reality of Supreme Court nominations: Hundreds of people clear the bar of qualifications and intelligence to serve. There’s no such thing as one most qualified candidate. Once a president is picking from that pool, other variables come into play: their age, their life experiences, their ideological inclinations, whether anything about them might complicate confirmation.

Every president takes those questions into consideration, and conservatives have supported some nominees precisely because of those ancillary qualities. They praised Amy Coney Barrett for being a mother of seven and for having not attended law school at Harvard or Yale like every other justice. They found that kind of diversity valuable.

One prominent conservative even wrote in 2018, “The main reason I favor Barrett, though, is the obvious one: She’s a woman.” More gender diversity among justices was seen as something Republicans should value.

Likewise, Brett “I like beer” Kavanaugh wasn’t chosen by President Donald Trump because he was the wisest jurist in the land. He was relatively young (then 53), so he could serve for a long time, and his years in Republican politics and stamp of approval from the Federalist Society assured Republicans that he’d be a reliable conservative vote. As an intellect, Kavanaugh is adequate, but no one claims he’s a generation-defining genius.

He’s a privileged white boy who checked all the boxes for GQP radicalism.

Conservatives have also conveniently forgotten that Ronald Reagan made a promise similar to Biden’s when he ran for president in 1980: He vowed to appoint the first female justice — and then did. When George H.W. Bush filled Thurgood Marshall’s seat with Clarence Thomas in 1991, everyone understood that Bush wanted to find a Black conservative.

But when a Democrat does the same thing, a noxious yet familiar narrative emerges: The true story of any advancement for a Black person, we’re told, is that White people are being victimized.

To repeat, it doesn’t matter whether conservatives expressing outrage that Biden will appoint someone with a stellar resume who is also a Black woman are genuinely motivated by racial animus. What matters is that they are quite intentionally engaged in a project of race-baiting, one that seeks to mobilize the racial fears and resentments of the Republican base.

They know exactly what they’re doing. And we shouldn’t let them claim otherwise.

Ruth Marcus adds, The carping over Biden’s Supreme Court pledge is historically inaccurate and racially tinged:

And so, the carping over the next Supreme Court nominee begins, historically ignorant and racially tinged.

President Biden’s “campaign promise that he’d appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court is unfortunate because it elevates skin color over qualifications,” sniffed [Rupert Murdoch’s] Wall Street Journal editorial board. Just a thought here, but maybe the two aren’t mutually exclusive?

The Cato Institute’s Ilya Shapiro, soon to be executive director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, chimed in on Twitter, saying the “objectively best pick” would be Sri Srinivasan, an Indian American judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. “But alas doesn’t fit into latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get [a] lesser black woman,” Shapiro tweeted. He later apologized, deleting his tweet as “inartful,” but the mind-set it revealed is breathtakingly insulting.

Lesser Black woman. Think about that. One leading candidate for the vacancy, D.C. Circuit Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, is a graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the law review, and went on to clerk for Justice Stephen G. Breyer; she served seven years on the D.C. district court before being elevated to the appeals court in 2021. Another, Leondra Kruger, has an equally glittering résumé: Harvard and Yale Law, John Paul Stevens clerkship, principal deputy solicitor general, California Supreme Court justice.

But that wasn’t all. “Because Biden said [he’d] only consider black women for SCOTUS, his nominee will always have an asterisk attached,” Shapiro observed in a separate tweet.

Asterisk, seriously?

Does Justice Sandra Day O’Connor have an asterisk attached because Ronald Reagan pledged he would name a woman to the Supreme Court? “It is time for a woman to sit among our highest jurists,” Reagan said during the 1980 presidential campaign. She turned out to be a fine justice, but her qualifications at the time were far less than the those of the candidates on Biden’s list.

Does Justice Clarence Thomas have an asterisk attached because President George H.W. Bush felt compelled to name a Black nominee to replace civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall? [Well, actually he does Ruth.]

“The fact that he is Black and a minority has nothing to do with this sense that he is the best qualified [sic] at this time,” Bush asserted when he announced the pick. “I kept my word to the American people and to the Senate by picking the best man for the job on the merits.” This was, literally, incredible. Thomas had a scant 15 months of experience on the D.C. Circuit when Bush tapped him.

Does Justice Amy Coney Barrett have an asterisk attached because President Donald Trump clearly needed to pick a woman to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg? “I’m saving her for Ginsburg,” Trump was reported to have said of Barrett when he passed her over in favor of nominating Brett M. Kavanaugh in 2018.

The truth is that politics — partisan, demographic, regional — has long played a role in Supreme Court nominations. Dwight D. Eisenhower chose William J. Brennan Jr. in part because he thought a Catholic Democrat from the Northeast would play well with voters in the election just a few weeks away. Reagan was so taken with the notion of naming the first Italian-American justice that he opted for Antonin Scalia over Robert H. Bork in 1986.

Somehow, none of these prompted the kind of aggrieved bristling that has erupted in the aftermath of Breyer’s announcement that he plans to retire at the end of the current term. Why might that be?

One legitimate answer is that Biden’s pledge was categorical, he would pick a Black woman; it was explicit rather than implied. And that is a difference. “I’m looking forward to making sure there’s a Black woman on the Supreme Court to make sure we in fact get everyone represented,” Biden said at a debate in February 2020, just before the South Carolina primary, when his campaign was struggling. The promise came at the urging of South Carolina Rep. James E. Clyburn, who shortly endorsed Biden.

And Biden reiterated it on Thursday. “I’ve made no decision except one, the person I will nominate will be someone of extraordinary qualifications, character and experience and that person will be the first Black woman ever nominated to the United States Supreme Court,” he said.

Would I be more comfortable if Biden hadn’t been quite so explicit? Yes [clutching her pearls]. Partly because it carries an aura of unfairness to announce that no one will be considered who does not meet an announced racial test. Ambiguity has its advantages.

[A]nd partly because it opens the door to critics denigrating the eventual nominee. Of course, that’s inevitable in any event. See, for example, Shapiro on Sonia Sotomayor when she was nominated in 2009: “In picking Sonia Sotomayor, President [Barack] Obama has confirmed that identity politics matter to him more than merit. While Judge Sotomayor exemplifies the American Dream, she would not have even been on the short list if she were not Hispanic.”

Oh, so because the White Nationalist Party will reflexively resort to race-baiting, President Biden should not have been so direct and forthright about his desire to appoint an African-American female jurist to the Supreme Court. We must stop allowing white nationalist racists to set the terms of the debate, Ruth. The only approriate response to their hysterical race-baiting is “fuck you.” They’ve had over 400 years. They had a good run, their time is over. There’s the door, don’t let it hit you in your racist ass on the way out. Good riddance.

For the record, Justice Sotomayor has emerged as one of the most intellectually enlightened and articulate voices on the court, admirably filling the shoes of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Hers is always the must-read opinion in any case.

Judges aren’t legal automatons, digesting precedents and spitting out opinions. They bring to the task, and their thinking is informed by, their backgrounds and their experiences. Somehow, that becomes a problem only for certain nominees, from certain backgrounds, from certain parties.

Because the White Nationalist Party has convinced itself that the Supreme Court is exclusively the province of radical Republicans, and only they are entitled to appoint justices to the Supreme Court, that it somehow “belongs” to them. The “Grim Reaper of Democracy,” Sen. Mitch McConnell, torched the Constitution and historical precedent to steal two Supreme Court seats from Democratic presidents even before Donald Trump tried to steal the presidency with a seditious insurrection on January 6. They are two sides of the same coin.