Joe Biden has declared that only black women will be considered for the open Supreme Court seat being vacated by Justice Breyer.
Had Joe Biden picked a black woman from an open field, nobody would be saying a word.
However, by limiting the nominees to only black women, he may have violated the Constitution, so says expert Jonathon Turley.
Pick at Risk
If Jonathan Turley is right, Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee could wind up before the Supreme Court, only not the way that Biden had planned.
This case more or less amounts to affirmative action being used to approve a Supreme Court nominee.
I want to be clear, this is not a knock against the eventual nominee, but Joe Biden really screwed up here by saying that he was ONLY considering black women for the nomination.
Biden should have created an open field and just included the women he wanted to nominate, then picked her out of that field.
Now, according to Turley, he has a real problem.
Turley stated, “As previously discussed, the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected such threshold exclusions on the basis of race or gender as raw discrimination.
“In 1977, the Court ruled in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, that affirmative action in medical school admissions was unconstitutional.
“The justices declared that preferring ‘members of any one group for no reason other than race or ethnic origin is discrimination for its own sake’ while adding that ‘this the Constitution forbids.'”
Jen Psaki just reaffirmed that the President will only consider a black woman for the next nomination — a threshold gender and race condition that the Court itself has found unconstitutional for schools and unlawful for private businesses. https://t.co/uzc5jInAlg
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) January 26, 2022
If someone decides to challenge this nomination on this premise, it could hold up Biden’s nominee for quite some time.
It could actually put Biden’s pick at risk of they can drag it out long enough for Republicans to take over the Senate in the mid-term elections.
The way Biden’s presidency is going, honestly, it would not be all that surprising to see happen.