With President Joe Biden’s nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the US Supreme Court, the normal suspects are weighing in with the normal rhetoric about the prospect. In nominating Jackson, who is black, Biden stated:
I believe it’s time that we have a court that shows the full skills and success of our nation with a nominee of remarkable credentials, and that we motivate all young people to think that they can one day serve their nation at the greatest level.
On the Republican side, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who recently voted to verify Jackson to the Washington, DC, court of appeals, declared that Jackson’s nomination constituted a success for “the extreme left.” Likewise, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas sees the nominationas identical to “racial discrimination” since Biden had formerly assured this SCOTUS slot to a black woman. Said Cruz:
What the president stated is that only African American women are qualified for this slot, that 94% of Americans are ineligible. The way Biden should do it is to state “I’m going to look for the best justice,” interview a lot of individuals, and if he takes place to choose a justice who was an African American female, then great.
In other words, Cruz desires the SCOTUS choice to be a meritocracy in which the president designates “the very best and the brightest” to this high federal government position. Of course, we have actually handled the “finest and the brightest in the past,” from Franklin Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust” that handled to put the “fantastic” in the Great Anxiety and John F. Kennedy’s “whiz kids” that offered us the ordeal in Vietnam.
To claim that presidents ought to look for to place the “most qualified” jurists on the high court is to overlook the history of Supreme Court visits as though they were not political. Franklin Roosevelt appointed Hugo Black of Alabama, who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan (something FDR and his administration attempted to conceal from the general public), not because Black was an excellent jurist, however because he was from the South and was an impassioned advocate of the New Offer. Roosevelt needed assistance from Southern Democrats and he likewise wanted to make sure that the Supreme Court would support his New Deal programs. Not surprisingly, Black consistently supported those programs and anything else from Congress that broadened state power.
President Ronald Reagan designated Sandra Day O’Connor to SCOTUS to meet a campaign pledge to designate a lady to the court, and Day was the most embellished Republican female judge. The consultation of Clarence Thomas followed the retirement of Thurgood Marshall. President George H.W. Bush did not want to be accused of bigotry for designating a white man to fill Marshall’s position, and Thomas was the best-known black Republican judge at the time.
Similarly, when Costs Clinton designated Ruth Bader Ginsberg to the high court, he was sending a clear message that his administration supported abortion rights. Ginsberg was a trustworthy (and foreseeable) vote on abortion and other problems. In truth, one can generally anticipate how justices will vote on a lot of concerns (although they do shock sometimes).
Concerning Biden’s election of a black lady to the high court, it is paradoxical that when Biden remained in the United States Senate and was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he threatened to filibuster the election of another black lady to the court, Janice Rogers Brown, forcing President George W. Bush to withdraw the nomination. Brown plainly was as certified as most of the others on the court, but her ideological and judicial leanings upset Biden and the Democrats. (It is twice as paradoxical that Biden now claims that the filibuster is an antique of “Jim Crow” but had no issue utilizing it to submarine the election of a black person.)
We can go on, but it is clear that Supreme Court nominations are based more on what will serve the interests of political elites who are in power than the legal and scholastic credentials of the nominees. In reality, given the reality that other than Justice Amy Coney Barrett (who went to law school at Notre Dame University), all the justices went to law school either at Harvard or Yale, Jackson will not disrupt that stability, having gone to Harvard Law (where she was graduated orgasm laude).
Therefore, one can state that American political and academic elites are well represented on the Supreme Court. Whether these justices represent the “best and the brightest” legal skill is another matter. Translating laws is not like analyzing math problems; rather, it has to do with creating interpretations that please a particular constituency.
Take Janice Rogers Brown again. The Democrats and certainly much of the legal facility claimed she was “unqualified” not because of defects in her intellect, but since she was vital of a variety of federal government programs. Brown certainly didn’t have an elite upbringing, being born to a sharecropper in Alabama, and got her undergraduate education at Sacramento State University and her law degree at UCLA. As a jurist, her opinions ranged from conservative to libertarian, and her speeches definitely rankled the political establishment, but nobody might challenge her intellect.
Brown was avoided the high court for the same reason that Jackson will be confirmed: politics. There is no “meritocracy” here. Justices do not approach the law as though they were philosopher-kings. Reality is various; the last thing political leaders desire is for justices to go rogue and use the law as it is composed or, even worse, in fact attempt to establish whether or not a law in fact fits within the legal specifications of the US Constitution. Instead, they want Woman Justice with her eyes wide open, putting her thumbs on the scale.