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.
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“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 “resemble 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 graduates from Yale or Harvard, a federal appeals judge, another to the Supreme Court of California… Scanning their qualifications, Republican Senator Roger Wicker estimated that the person chosen by Joe Biden would be “the recipient of some kind of quota”, while her colleague Ted Cruz choked on the thought of the white judges being kept on the sidelines.
“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 regarding you. He says if you are a white man, good luck! If you are 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. “American presidents have always taken into account a combination of political factors and the personal characteristics of the candidates”, also underlines Douglas Keith, lawyer withinu think tank Brennan Center for Justice in an exchange with AFP.
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 in part because of his Italian origins.
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. Their critics today are “dishonest”, concludes Douglas Keith: “the message is perhaps mainly aimed at their constituents.”
For political science professor Michael Tesler, of Irvine University in California, they are explained by the growing gap between Democrats and Republicans on the issue of racism in the United States.
If the left is now very sensitive to the structural difficulties encountered by minorities, “the politics of the Republican Party is increasingly driven by the belief that discrimination once morest whites is such an important problem”, he writes on the site of ‘statistical analysis FiveThirtyEight.
According to a survey YouGov/Yahoo, 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 almost systematic opposition of the Republicans. But the debates might turn sour.
On Thursday, Democratic Senator Alex Padilla got his feet wet during the Judiciary Committee’s consideration of a black judge’s candidacy for a federal court position.
Candidates of color were treated differently during our auditions with insinuations (…) or hostility regarding their qualifications or opinions,” he noted.
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.
