Biden’s Identity-Driven Supreme Court Nomination | City Journal
With the coming retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer, President Joe Biden is poised to fulfill his campaign pledge to nominate a black female to the Supreme Court. It is worth revisiting, therefore, a little-noticed announcement from Biden s second month in office.
In February 2021, the Biden administration signaled its intentions to lower the standards for federal judicial appointments. Traditionally, presidents have submitted their judicial nominees to the American Bar Association for evaluation before announcing their choice in public. The ABA assigned potential candidates scores of well qualified, qualified, or not qualified, based on research about the nominee s legal competence, integrity, and temperament. A not qualified rating, though confidential, served as a de facto veto.
The White House Counsel s Office disclosed in February 2021 that it would not involve the ABA in preclearance. Republican presidents have also cut the ABA out of the confidential vetting process in recent years, on the ground that the association was biased against conservatives. That charge was plausible. The reason that the Biden administration gave for sidestepping the ABA, however, strained credulity: The ABA was insufficiently attuned to the need for diversity on the bench. Allowing the ABA to vet candidates was incompatible with the diversification of the judiciary, explained a member of the White House Counsel s Office.
The idea that the ABA is indifferent to identity politics is laughable. Its leading members are obsessed with the racial and sex demographics of corporate law firms and law school faculties. This is the same ABA that gave its highest rating to Supreme Court nominee Sonia ( over 100,000 children . . . in serious condition, and many on ventilators from Covid) Sotomayor. It is a measure of how far the Biden administration intended to stray from even a diversity-driven standard of competence that it saw the ABA as a roadblock.
Funny how I have no problem finding bad news for my blog. Anything hopeful, sunny, optimistic, etc., you find, please let me know. It’s getting a bit tedious just documenting the decline.