If Biden Wants a Truly Diverse SCOTUS, He Should Look Outside of the Ivy League, Not Worry About Race and Gender – Opinion

At a joint event with retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer in late January, President Biden reiterated his promise to nominate a Black woman to the nation’s highest court, fulfilling one of the president’s campaign promises.

Biden indicated that Biden expected the announcement of the candidate before the end this month.

“I’ve made no decision except one: The person I will nominate will be someone with extraordinary qualifications, character, experience and integrity. And that person will be the first Black woman ever nominated to the United States Supreme Court,” Biden said at the Jan. 27 event. “It’s long overdue, in my view.”

At the heart of Biden’s choice to nominate a Black woman, as opposed to basing his decision on qualifications alone, is the common belief held by many on the left that people of different races and genders have unique life experiences that better prepare them to make policy, understand people coming from similar backgrounds, and even serve on the Supreme Court.

A white male justice, it has been argued, can’t fully understand the challenges facing racial minorities and women, and most of those who have served on the court throughout its history have been white men.

Others in favor of Biden’s view believe that more Black Americans should be appointed to the Supreme Court because African Americans have been underrepresented in decades past, and because there is an inherent value in racial diversity.

No one can deny that personal experiences, many of which have been shaped by race and played an integral role in the development of many professions. And it is equally true that Black Americans were for most of America’s history unjustly underrepresented on the Supreme Court. Although these arguments are well-intentioned and may seem valid, they do not justify using race or gender in the selection of Supreme Court justices.

The first is that the ultimate goal of any legal system must be to exempt race and gender from its application and analysis. In decades past, many people have fought and died to ensure that gender and race would not be included in the law’s application and analysis. It is notThese are the foundations on which laws can be applied.

It is not worth insisting on a particular mixture of gender or race as the best. This is an attempt to return to the horrible ideas of the past that Americans have desperately tried to flee from for years. You can’t cure racism with more racism, however noble the cause might be, and that’s precisely what the White House claims it is doing.

The Supreme Court’s current composition disproves most of these arguments. The lone Black justice on the bench today is a constitutional originalist who rarely issues opinions in line with Biden’s views, which are supposedly more beneficially for racial minorities.

Similarly, another of the court’s more conservative justices is its newest member, Amy Coney Barrett, a woman with whom Biden frequently disagrees.

Why, I wonder, doesn’t the race of Clarence Thomas or the gender of Amy Coney Barrett compel them to issue the opinions Biden thinks are correct?

Suggesting race and gender help to determine how justices apply the law does not appear to be how the Supreme Court operates today, and that’s a good thing. It is important that the law be applied regardless of race and gender. The same should apply when considering the qualifications for judicial nominees.

Third, if Biden’s goal is to provide better representation for racial minorities on the Supreme Court purely because minorities have been underrepresented on the bench in the past, then why isn’t Biden planning to nominate an Asian American, since there has NeverA justice on the Asian American Supreme Court

If Biden truly wants to infuse the Supreme Court with unique perspectives, as he claims, then the best way to do it isn’t to nominate a judge based in part on race or gender. Biden should pick a justice who has a distinct background in law.

Biden would make a great first step in creating an inclusive Supreme Court. He could choose someone who has been trained at one of very few elite law schools and has had experience with a wide range of legal professions.

Over the past 40 years, the vast majority of the justices chosen for the Supreme Court — by Democratic and Republican presidents alike — have graduated from just two law schools:  Harvard and Yale. Harvard boasts seven Supreme Court justices from its alumni since 1981, while Yale only has four.

Over the same period, just four justices confirmed to the court graduated from schools other than Harvard and Yale: Amy Coney Barrett (Notre Dame), Sandra Day O’Connor (Stanford), Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Columbia), and William Rehnquist (Stanford). Justice Ginsburg was a Harvard graduate before she transferred to Columbia.

Currently, all of the Supreme Court justices, except Coney Barrett who is currently on the bench, are graduates from Yale or Harvard.

In other words, in the four-decades that have passed, only five out of 199 American Bar Association law schools were approved to train the Supreme Court justices. This is not intellectual diversity.

There are some who continue to insist that Biden’s emphasis on race and gender will lead to better outcomes and a more diverse court, but what is likely to have had a greater impact on a judicial nominee responsible for issuing complex Legal opinions — skin color and gender, or the institution responsible for teaching him or her the Law?

Justin Haskins ([email protected]) He is also the Director of The Socialism Research Center at The Heartland Institute, and co-author of The New York Times Bestseller Book. Joe Biden’s Great Reset and Twenty-First Century Fascism: Joe Biden.