Without even knowing who Joe Biden will appoint to the Supreme Court of the United States, Republicans have begun to attack his promise to choose for the first time in history a black woman, giving a taste of the bitterness of the debates to to come. “I want a candidate who knows the difference between a law book and a catalog” of fashion, launched Senator John Kennedy who, as a member of the Judiciary Committee of the Upper House, will participate in the interrogation of the judge chosen by Joe Biden. It is indeed to the Senate that returns the task of confirming the federal magistrates.
Wanting the high court to “look like the country”, the Democratic president must announce his choice at the end of February. In an interview with the NBC channel, he explains that he is focusing on four “incredibly qualified” magistrates. Among the names circulating include Yale or Harvard graduates, a federal appeals judge, another at the Supreme Court of California…
Skin color, sex and religion have always been taken into account
Scanning their qualifications, Republican Sen. Roger Wicker opined that Joe Biden’s chosen person would be “the recipient of some kind of quota”, while his colleague Ted Cruz choked on the thought of the white judges held to court. difference. “Black women represent what? Let’s say 6% of the American population,” he said on his podcast. So Joe Biden “says to 94% of Americans, ‘I don’t give a damn about you’. He says “if you’re a white man, good luck! If you’re a white woman, good luck!” Yet of the 115 justices who have served on the Supreme Court since its inception, 107 have been white men, compared to two black men and five women, four white and one Hispanic.
But “American presidents have always taken into account a combination of political factors and the personal characteristics of the candidates”, underlines Douglas Keith, jurist at the think tank Brennan Center for Justice. Republican Ronald Reagan promised to appoint the first woman to the Supreme Court before selecting Sandra Day O’Connor in 1981, and in 1986 chose magistrate Antonin Scalia partly because of his Italian origins. Religion also weighed: during the second half of the 20th century, a seat was always reserved for a Jewish magistrate, and another for a Catholic, without the Republicans finding anything wrong with it.
The Democratic electorate supports the idea
Their critics today are “dishonest”, concludes Douglas Keith: “the message is perhaps mainly aimed at their voters. For political science professor Michael Tesler of Irvine University in California, they can be explained by the growing gap between Democrats and Republicans on the issue of racism in the United States. “Republican Party politics are increasingly driven by the belief that discrimination against whites is as big a problem” as the structural difficulties faced by minorities, he writes.
Standing out from the frontal criticism of her peers, a Republican senator from the state of Maine, Susan Collins, called on her party to be cautious, while regretting that the ethnic origin of the future elected person was highlighted. “There are plenty of black women qualified for the job and given that Democrats have, alas, had success trying to portray Republicans as Anti-Black, it might make it harder to weed out a black lawyer. “, she pointed out.
According to a YouGov/Yahoo poll, 87% of Joe Biden voters support the idea of nominating a black woman, while 57% of Donald Trump voters oppose it. Democrats having control of the Senate, the candidate of Joe Biden should be confirmed despite the quasi-systematic opposition of the Republicans.