“The idea that race and gender should be the No. 1 and No. 2 criteria is not as it should be… On the other hand, there are many qualified Black women for this post and given that Democrats, regrettably, have had some success in trying to paint Republicans as anti-Black, it may make it more difficult to reject a Black jurist.”
That’s how Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, speaking with the New York Times, assessed the road ahead as President Joe Biden prepares to announce his replacement for retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, and the declaration by Biden that he will nominate a Black woman for the post.
That criteria has met with both support and backlash from various members of the senate, who will be called on to either confirm or deny Biden’s choice for the bench.
While Collins may believe that Republicans voting against a Black woman taking a coveted seat on the highest court in the land could have negative political implications, other GOP senators have no such qualms about their criticisms.
“The fact that he's willing to make a promise at the outset, that it must be a Black woman, I got to say that's offensive,” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas railed on his podcast, adding that, in his opinion, Biden’s vow “is actually an insult to Black women.”
Biden is actually repeating a promise he made during his campaign for the Presidency in 2020 and, in fact, spent much of his first year in the White House diversifying the judiciary branch at the federal level. Of his 40 appointments to federal judgeships (the most of any President since Ronald Reagan), almost half have been women, and more than half of those were women of color.
While Biden has not tipped his hand as to who might be the nominee, the top two candidates have been speculated to be Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the US Circuit Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia and California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger.
Related
