President Joe Biden faced backlash on Thursday after he announced that he would replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer with someone in-part based on their race and their sex.
“The person I nominate to replace Justice Breyer will be someone with extraordinary qualifications. Character, experience, and integrity,” Biden wrote on Twitter. “And they will be the first Black woman nominated to the United States Supreme Court.”
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki confirmed this week that Biden had “reiterated his commitment to nominating a black woman to the Supreme Court and certainly stands by that.”
Notable responses included:
- Ben Shapiro, The Daily Wire: “Joe Biden will nominate a black woman for the Supreme Court because he said he would select someone based on race and sex, and then we will be told that noting that this is definitionally affirmative action and race discrimination is itself racist.” He added, “Also, there’s a reason Democrats never miss with their SCOTUS picks: they overtly choose wild Leftists. That’s the only real qualification. They wouldn’t care whether Biden nominated an HLS grad who clerked for Breyer or Cardi B, so long as that person voted reliably Left.”
- Joel Pollak, Breitbart News: “Will this justice recuse herself from affirmative action cases?”
- Tom Fitton, Judicial Watch: “Breaking: @Potus officially commits to racial and sex discrimination in Supreme Court pick. The Senate cannot abide in this.”
- Dan McLaughlin, National Review: “Can’t even say ‘she’ when describing a woman.”
- Noah Pollak: “Announcing you are excluding all but one race and sex from consideration for a job opening is completely illegal and unconstitutional in every other context.”
- John Daniel Davidson, The Federalist: “This is racist and sexist and every person in America knows it.”
- Caleb Hull, digital strategist: “He’s already using ‘they’ pronouns to describe the person… What a disaster this is about to be.”
- Oren Cass, American Compass: “Great things about grammar is that it enforces logic. The incoherence of progressive identity politics is captured perfectly in this use of ‘they’ rather than ‘she’ as singular pronoun in a tweet specifically committed to insisting that the person in question will be a woman.”
- Hillel Neuer, attorney: “I bet you a million dollars that the extraordinary first Black woman who gets appointed to the Supreme Court will want to be called she, and so I don’t know why the president made a point of calling her they.”
- Abigail Shrier, journalist: “While millions of black women have character, intelligence, and integrity, there are only approximately *4 judges* that have anything close to the experience necessary to be a SCOTUS judge. That’s a tiny pool for Biden to restrict his search to.”
- Barrington Martin II, political commentator: “Reminder… you considered the new voting laws enacted by Republican led state legislatures were ‘Jim Crow 2.0.’ Now you’re planning to appoint a new SCOTUS justice on the mere basis of race and gender. This is the true Jim Crow 2.0. State sponsored prejudice in job appointment.”
- Ian Miles Cheong, journalist: “Sad to see you excluding Hispanic, Asian, Indian, Native American, White and Pacific Islanders for the role.”