President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

I was responding to the attempted sarcasm post about Johsnon and Thurgood Marshall.

You hate to tell me what? Of course you need to be open to appointing a woman or a racial minority for it to happen.

Joe Biden could have been open to it without having earmarked a seat that wasn't even open yet to a specific gender and race. What that did was tag her with her gender and race rather than her merits, more than implying that her race and gender WERE her merits. It's too bad. I believed it was counterproductive to reaching the color-blind, gender-neutral goals I think we both are talking about. It's how you end up with tokenism. We have been here before.

The stronger way to do it would have been to simply nominate a black woman when the time came, which would have sent a signal that out of all the possible candidates he could have picked, he thought she was the right person. But he chose to use it all as a prop during the election to vie for votes.

 

Because it's inconsequential. Reagan shouldn't have done it with Sandra Day O'Connor. Biden shouldn't have done it with Ketanji Jackson. The difference is that Ronald Reagan hasn't been president for decades and we were discussing something right now. I wasn't interested in the typical whataboutism. The dumbest thing about you trying to drag me into a rabbit hole (which is all you do) rather than staying on point, is that Reagan was criticized at the time for EXACTLY what I am saying. His own aides at the time were saying that it wasn't a partisan decision, it was pure politics -- vying for votes. And. ... Ronald Reagan is dead, the 1980s were a long time ago and this is a politics thread about Joe Biden.

 

There is no particular resume that makes someone qualified to be a Supreme Court Justice. Earl Warren had never even been a judge before jumping right into being chief justice.

People parsing credentials today is even more ridiculous than ever, because the chief qualification has nothing to do with your ability as a jurist (although they have all done the clerkships, are up to the task), it's what you are going to do with a position that has been turned into a de facto legislative role that has expanded the power of the court well beyond its judiciary role.