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      Why are rightwingers so opposed to a Black woman supreme court nominee? | Thomas Zimmer

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      Why are US rightwingers so opposed to a Black woman supreme court nominee?Thomas ZimmerThe right’s alarmed reaction to Biden’s pledge to nominate a Black woman to the supreme court reveals the conservative siege mentality When Joe Biden publicly pledged to nominate a Black woman to the US supreme court, conservative politicians, activists, and intellectuals certainly didn’t try to hide their disdain. The announcement was “offensive,” Texas Senator Ted Cruz argued, proof that the President didn’t care about 94% of Americans (everyone who is not a Black woman); and even though it’s unclear who the candidate will be, Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker already knows he won’t support this affirmative action “beneficiary.” Tucker Carlson railed against Biden’s “casual racism,” and the conservative legal establishment also vowed to fight against this “lesser Black woman,” as Ilya Shapiro, the vice president of the Cato Institute, put it. Legal scholar Jonathan Turley, finally, bemoaned “exclusionary criteria of race and sex” – which apparently is a problem only if and when they result in the selection of someone who is *not* a white man. Let’s remember: 115 people have been appointed to the court in its 232-year existence – seven have not been white men. Seven.Biden to nominate first Black woman to sit on supreme court by end of FebruaryRead moreThis rather alarmed response tells us a lot about how the right views the political conflict, precisely because it is seemingly at odds with the fact that the conservative majority on the court is not in jeopardy. Any assessment of these reactions must start by recognizing their racist and sexist nature. They are revealing precisely because they were so reflexive, so visceral. Misogynoir – anti-Black misogyny – forms the basis of this conservative scorn.But there is something else on display here too. A Black woman replacing Justice Breyer won’t change the court’s arithmetic. And yet, conservatives still feel threatened by Biden’s announcement because they understand it symbolizes the recognition that having white men dominate the powerful institutions of American life is a problem – and that rectifying this imbalance is an urgent task. They reject the notion that the country’s institutions should reflect the composition of the people; they know representation matters, and that a Black woman ascending to a position like this is also an acknowledgment of past injustice.Conservatives see Biden’s announcement as an indication of how powerful the forces of liberalism, “wokeism,” and multiculturalism – those radically “Un-American” ideas that are threatening “real” (read: white Christian patriarchal) America – have already become. In this way, Biden’s pledge is perceived as yet more evidence that the Right is on the retreat. It is impossible to understand conservative politics in general without grappling with this pervasive siege mentality.The fact that a reactionary majority will dominate the supreme court for a generation doesn’t do much to alleviate these fears. The Right doesn’t look at the Court in isolation, but considers the judiciary as part of an all-encompassing conflict over the fate of America. And conservatives understand clearly that this conflict isn’t confined to the political realm, but plays out in all areas of American life: it defines politics, society, culture – and in some of these spheres, conservatives are indeed losing.The Right is reacting to something real: due to political, cultural, and demographic changes, the country has indeed become less white, less conservative, less Christian. The balance of political power doesn’t (yet) reflect that, as the US system has many undemocratic distortions and is deliberately set up in a way that disconnects these changing demographic and cultural realities from political power. But conservatives realize that their vision for American society has come under pressure.Nothing symbolized this threat to white dominance like Barack Obama’s presidency – an outrageous subversion of what reactionaries understand as America’s natural order, made worse by the fact that the first Black president managed to get re-elected with less than 40% of the white vote. Republicans are attempting to undermine democracy because they are under no illusion about the lack of majority support for their preferred version of “real” America.The fact remains that conservatives have secured a stable majority on the supreme court, thereby guaranteeing that the court will support the reactionary political project. But it is not just political power they seek, but cultural domination and affirmation. In the cultural sphere, the shift in power away from white conservatives has been more pronounced, leading to the recurring rightwing moral panics of recent years.The freak-outs over #MeToo, “cancel culture” and “wokeism” are reactions to the fact that traditionally marginalized groups have indeed gained enough political and cultural influence to make their claims heard and demand a modicum of respect. It has traditionally been the prerogative of a white male elite to determine what is and what is not acceptable in US society. That prerogative has come under fire, and it’s not something the judiciary can fully restore.It’s important to note that it’s really more the potential of losing privilege that is animating these reactionary panics. In practice, the traditional power structures have held up mostly fine. But still, the privileged status of white men has never been under more scrutiny. Put simply, being a member of the white male elite is slightly less comfortable today than it used to be.Against this broader background, conservatives understand Biden’s announcement as evidence that the dreaded forces responsible for the general assault on white male rule keep ascending within America’s institutions. Whether or not it has any immediate effect on the supreme court’s decisions, for a movement centered around the idea that America is a white Christian patriarchal nation, a place where white Christian men have a Right to dominate, a Black woman rising remains a threat.President Biden’s public pledge to nominate a Black woman to the supreme court represents an affirmation of multiracial pluralism. That’s why it matters. It’s an acknowledgment that the traditional dominance of white men was never the result of meritocratic structures, but of a discriminatory system, and that it’s time to dismantle that system. It will help redefine what the American political, social, and cultural elite looks like – reshaping ideas in the collective imaginary of the nation of who gets to be at the top. As multiracial, pluralistic democracy is under assault, that matters a lot.
      Thomas Zimmer is a visiting professor at Georgetown University, focused on the history of democracy and its discontents in the United States, and a Guardian US contributing opinion writer
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      Supreme court: Stephen Breyer ‘did not want to die on bench’, says brother

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      Supreme court: Stephen Breyer ‘did not want to die on bench’, says brotherPressure campaign was fired by fear of repeat of disaster when Republicans replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg

      Biden poised to appoint first Black female justice
      01:03Stephen Breyer, the supreme court justice who announced his retirement this week, “did not want to die on the bench”.White House burns Wicker for criticising Biden supreme court pickRead moreSo his brother, the federal judge Charles Breyer, told the Washington Post at the end of a momentous week in US politics.Democrats, meanwhile, rejected Republican complaints that Joe Biden’s pledge to nominate the first Black woman to the court meant he was prioritising politics over qualifications, or endorsing racially based affirmative action, or that the new justice would be too liberal.The Democratic chair of the Senate judiciary committee hinted at claims some criticism may be racially motivated, saying he hoped Republicans were not “doing it for personal reasons”.Breyer’s decision to step down, at 83, gives Biden the chance to nominate a liberal replacement. The pick will not alter the balance of the court, which conservatives dominate 6-3 after Donald Trump capitalised on ruthless Republican tactics to install three justices in four years.But progressives campaigned to convince Breyer to quit, many citing what happened when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on the court in September 2020. Republicans who held the Senate confirmed her replacement – the hardline Catholic Amy Coney Barrett, nominated after Trump promised to pick a woman – before the November election.Democrats should be able to confirm Biden’s pick without Republican votes but they face losing the Senate in November. With that in mind, the campaign to convince Breyer picked up speed. Breyer spoke about how the court should not be politicised but one activist, Brian Fallon of Demand Justice, told the Post: “You have to view this as a political fight. It’s not a legal fight.”Charles Breyer told the Post his brother “was aware of this campaign. I think what impressed him was not the campaign but the logic of the campaign.“And he thought he should take into account the fact that this was an opportunity for a Democratic president – and he was appointed by a Democratic president [Bill Clinton] – to fill his position with someone who is like-minded. He did not want to die on the bench.”On Sunday, Dick Durbin of Illinois, chair of the Senate judiciary committee, told NBC’s Meet the Press: “I didn’t feel that external pressure was really helpful at all. [Breyer] had to make this decision. It is an important and timely decision in his life as to the right moment. And I didn’t want to push him, and I didn’t.”But a congressman who campaigned for Breyer to retire, Mondaire Jones of New York, told the Post that though “people adore Ruth Bader Ginsburg … the fact is, due to decisions or non-decisions around retirement, made by her, we got Amy Coney Barrett.”The Post said the White House did not pressure Breyer.“None of the justices want to be told when to leave,” Charles Breyer said. “They want to decide themselves. And that, I think, the president and others recognised. It actually worked out.”Republicans have signaled a willingness to make life uncomfortable for Biden’s nominee – as revenge for what happened to Brett Kavanaugh.Trump’s second pick, replacing the retiring Anthony Kennedy, faced accusations of sexual assault. He vehemently denied them. Democrats prominently including Kamala Harris, then a California senator, vehemently attacked him. Harris is now vice-president, presiding over the 50-50 Senate with a vote to confirm Biden’s pick.On Friday, the Republican senator Roger Wicker told Mississippi radio the Kavanaugh confirmation was “one of the most disgraceful, shameful things and completely untruthful things that [Democrats have] ever, ever done”.Wicker also predicted that Biden’s nominee would get no Republican votes. He said so in part because the GOP expects a more progressive choice than Breyer, who Wicker called a “nice, stately liberal”. But Wicker also complained about “affirmative racial discrimination [for] someone who is the beneficiary of this sort of quota”, at a time when the court seems poised to rule such practices unconstitutional.The White House reminded Wicker of his unquestioning support for Barrett.Speaking to ABC’s This Week, Durbin said Republicans should “recall that it was Ronald Reagan who announced that he was going to appoint a woman to the supreme court, and he did, Sandra Day O’Connor, and it was Donald Trump who announced that he was going to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg with a woman nominee as well.“African American women, if they have achieved the level of success in the practice of law and jurisprudence, they’ve done it against great odds. They’re extraordinary people … they’re all going to face the same close scrutiny.US supreme court will hear challenge to affirmative action in college admissionRead more“… I just hope that those who are critical of the president’s selection aren’t doing it for personal reasons.”Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican senator, told Fox News Sunday Republicans would probably not support Biden’s pick “because I’ve seen dozens of his nominees to the lower courts and they’ve almost to person been leftwing ideologues”.Cotton also complained about Democrats’ treatment of Clarence Thomas, who was accused of sexual harassment in a stormy confirmation process, Biden playing a leading role as a senator from Delaware, in 1991.Most expect Democrats to move quickly. Durbin told NBC: “A great deal depends on the nominee. If the person has been before the committee seeking approval for a circuit court, then the committee knows quite a bit about that person.“If there are no new developments for someone who’s been before the committee in the previous year or two, it makes a real difference.”A leading contender, Ketanji Brown Jackson, was confirmed to the DC appeals court last June with Republican support. She replaced Merrick Garland, Biden’s attorney general who was nominated to the supreme court by Barack Obama in 2016 but blocked by Republicans.“I can just say this,” Durbin said. “It’s going to be fair, it’s going to be deliberate and we’re going to be timely about it too. This is a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land. We should take it seriously.”TopicsUS supreme courtUS constitution and civil libertiesLaw (US)US politicsBiden administrationJoe BidenDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

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      White House burns Wicker for criticising Biden supreme court pick

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      White House burns Wicker for criticising Biden supreme court pickRepublican senator says choice will be beneficiary of affirmative action but critics point to support for Trump vow to pick woman

      Leading contenders for Biden’s supreme court pick
      01:03In a barbed intervention on Saturday, the White House said it hoped a Republican senator who complained that Joe Biden’s supreme court pick would be the beneficiary of race-based affirmative action, would give the nominee the same consideration he gave Amy Coney Barrett.Who has more influence on supreme court: Clarence Thomas or his activist wife?Read moreBarrett was nominated and confirmed shortly before the 2020 election, after Donald Trump pledged to pick a woman to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The hardline Catholic duly succeeded the liberal lion, establishing a 6-3 conservative majority.Biden has pledged to put the first Black woman on the court as a replacement for Stephen Breyer, the 83-year-old liberal who this week announced his retirement.On Friday, Roger Wicker of Mississippi complained that Biden’s pick would therefore be a beneficiary of race-based affirmative action, which the court seems poised to declare unconstitutional, having said it will consider a challenge concerning college admissions.Wicker told a radio station in his state: “The irony is that the supreme court is at the very time hearing cases about this sort of affirmative racial discrimination while adding someone who is the beneficiary of this sort of quota.“The majority of the court may be saying writ large that it’s unconstitutional. We’ll see how that irony works out.”On Saturday, a White House spokesperson noted that after Trump promised to pick a woman, Wicker merely said he hoped Barrett would be “an inspiration” to his granddaughters.“We hope Senator Wicker will give President Biden’s nominee the same consideration he gave to then-Judge Barrett,” the spokesperson said.Breyer has protested that the court is not political, but though his retirement will not give Biden a chance to change the ideological balance of the panel, the president will be able to install a younger liberal before Democrats defend control of the Senate.Many have seen rich historic irony in conservative complaints about Biden’s pledge to nominate based on race and gender.The historian Rick Perlstein was among those to point out that Ronald Reagan, the hero of the modern Republican party, chose a justice entirely because she was a woman.Before his victory over Jimmy Carter in 1980, Reagan announced that “one of the first supreme court vacancies in my administration will be filled by the most qualified woman I can possibly find”.He duly nominated Sandra Day O’Connor, a political moderate and the first woman to sit on the court.“She was totally unqualified on paper,” Perlstein said, on Twitter. “[Zero] con[stitutional] law experience. Reagan lucked out.”Wicker also told SuperTalk Mississippi Radio he feared Biden’s pick would be more progressive than Breyer.“We’re going to go from a nice, stately liberal to someone who’s probably more in the style of Sonia Sotomayor,” the senator said, adding: “I hope it’s at least someone who will at least not misrepresent the facts. I think they will misinterpret the law.”Many observers made Ketanji Brown Jackson, 51, and a member of the US court of appeals for the DC circuit, favourite to be Biden’s pick. Jackson replaced Merrick Garland, now attorney general but in 2016, the nominee Republicans refused to give even a hearing when Barack Obama picked him to replace Antonin Scalia.Liberals across America sigh with relief about Justice Breyer’s retirement | Moira DoneganRead moreAn era of bitter partisan warfare ensued. This time, Democrats will court Republican moderates such as Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine and Mitt Romney of Utah. But Wicker said Biden’s pick would in all likelihood “not get a single Republican vote”.“But we will not treat her like the Democrats did Brett Kavanaugh,” he said, in reference to the bitter fight over Trump’s second nominee, who denied accusations of sexual assault.Democrats need only stick together to succeed. Thanks to a Republican rule change, nominees require only a simple majority. The Senate is split 50-50 but controlled by the casting vote of the vice-president, Kamala Harris.Wicker pointed to a wish for at least symbolic vengeance, saying the Kavanaugh fight “was one of the most disgraceful, shameful things and completely untruthful things that [Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee have] ever, ever done”.TopicsUS supreme courtJoe BidenRepublicansUS politicsLaw (US)newsReuse this content More

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      Who has more influence on supreme court: Clarence Thomas or his activist wife?

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      Who has more influence on supreme court: Clarence Thomas or his activist wife?Justice’s wife, Ginni Thomas, sits on the board of conservative group that backs lawsuit seeking to end affirmative action, raising concerns it could present potential conflict of interest Clarence Thomas, the hardline conservative supreme court justice, is facing calls for his recusal in the case over race-based affirmative action in college admissions that the court agreed to hear this week.US supreme court will hear challenge to affirmative action in college admissionRead moreThe case, which is being brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, is the latest potential conflict of interest involving Thomas and his wife Virginia Thomas. Ginni, as she is known, is a prominent rightwing activist who speaks out on a raft of issues that frequently come before the nation’s highest court.A one-person conservative powerhouse, she set up her own lobbying company Liberty Consulting in 2010. By her own description, she has “battled for conservative principles in Washington” for over 35 years.The challenge to the two universities’ race-conscious admissions policies is being brought by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA). Its leader Edward Blum has been a relentless opponent of affirmative action and voting rights laws.His argument that race-based affirmative action is a quota system that discriminates against Asian students is framed with the supreme court’s newly emboldened rightwing majority in mind. A central player in that new six-justice conservative supermajority is Clarence Thomas, who is the longest-serving of the justices and at 73 will be the oldest once Stephen Breyer retires.Justice Thomas’s influence has soared in recent months with the rightward shift of the court following Donald Trump’s three nominations, to the extent that some pundits now dub him the unofficial chief justice of the court.SFFA’s lawsuit seeking to strike down affirmative action has received the enthusiastic backing of the conservative National Association of Scholars. It filed an amicus brief in support of the suit, accusing Harvard admissions officials of being prejudiced against Asian students and stereotyping them as “uninteresting, uncreative and one-dimensional”.Ginni Thomas sits on the advisory board of the National Association of Scholars. Observers are concerned that her position with a group that has intervened in the affirmative action case could present appearances of conflict of interest.Noah Bookbinder, president of the government ethics watchdog Crew, told the Guardian that while supreme court regulations may not legally require Thomas to recuse himself, there were serious questions to answer.“Ginni Thomas is an advisory board member of an organization that has taken a very specific position on a case in front of her husband. That will make it hard for the public to be confident that he’s going to be totally unbiased.”Bookbinder said that in the circumstances “the better course of action would be for him to recuse or for her to cease her involvement in that organization.”The potential appearance of a conflict of interest over the Harvard case was noted in a recent investigation by the New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer that takes a deep dive into the overlapping interests of the couple. The article chronicles in devastating detail the many instances where Ginni’s political activism appears to present problems for the image and integrity of the court.“Ginni Thomas has held so many leadership or advisory positions at conservative pressure groups that it’s hard to keep track of them,” Mayer concluded. “Many, if not all, of these groups have been involved in cases that have come before her husband.”In the most troubling recent instance, Ginni Thomas lent her voice to Trump’s big lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. She was vocal on the subject in the buildup to the violent insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6 last year that led to the deaths of five people and left more than 100 police officers injured.On the morning of the January 6 itself, Mark Joseph Stern of Slate reported, Thomas posted on her Facebook page words of encouragement for the “Stop the Steal” marchers in Washington. “LOVE MAGA people!!!!”, she said., “GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP or PRAYING!”Soon after the insurrection, Thomas was forced to apologise to her husband’s former supreme court law clerks for comments she made privately to them that appeared to lament Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election. The remarks were sent to a private email list called “Thomas Clerk World”.In the emails, disclosed by the Washington Post, she wrote: “Many of us are hurting, after leaving it all on the field, to preserve the best of this country. I feel I have failed my parents who did their best and taught me to work to preserve liberties.”An even more direct intervention in the politics surrounding Trump and the big lie was made last December when Thomas joined 62 other influential conservatives in signing an open letter to the leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy. It urged him to expel the Congress members Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from the Republican party.Their sin, the letter writers opined, was to serve on the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. They described the committee as an “overtly partisan political persecution that brings disrespect to our country’s rule of law [and] legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong”.Since the Capitol insurrection, the Department of Justice has arrested more than 725 defendants in relation to the storming of the building. Federal prosecutors have charged 225 with assaulting, resisting or impeding police officers, including over 75 charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily harm to an officer.Last week the supreme court rejected attempts by Trump to block the January 6 committee from acquiring his White House records from the time of the attack. There was only one dissent from the bench to that 8-to-1 decision: it came from Clarence Thomas.“Ginni Thomas’s activities are unprecedented in supreme court history in terms of a spouse engaging in issues that are constantly before the court,” said Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, a non-partisan group which advocates supreme court reform. “The appearance of impropriety is in itself impropriety – all the supreme court has is the trust of the public, and once you chip away at that you are in trouble.”Roth added that Thomas’s comments in the days before January 6 were clearly problematic given her husband’s vote on the Trump documents. “It’s possible that the January 6 committee has emails between Ginni Thomas and administration officials from that day or the days leading up to it given how vocal she was. That’s definitely a place where Justice Thomas should have recused himself.”Should the rightwing majority around Thomas use its newfound muscle to ban affirmative action, as is widely predicted, it would mark the negation of more than 30 years of settled constitutional law on the matter. What lies ahead bears strong resemblance to Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that made abortion legal which the court is probably poised to weaken or even overturn outright.Mayer points out in the New Yorker that an amicus brief was filed in the supreme court case challenging Roe by Robert George who also sits on the advisory board of the National Association of Scholars alongside Ginni Thomas.Roth told the Guardian that a simpler solution to the full recusal of Clarence Thomas from the affirmative action case might exist. That would be to remove the National Association of Scholars’ amicus brief.“There is an easy way to deal with this perceived conflict of interest – strike the amicus brief,” he said.It is established practice in all federal appeals courts, though not in the supreme court, that amicus briefs brought by anybody with a connection to a judge hearing a case are routinely thrown out.The president of the National Association of Scholars, Peter Wood, told the Guardian that he knew of no conflict of interest relating to Thomas’s position on the advisory board. “Ms Thomas’s role is to provide advice to NAS in response to questions I put to her about NAS policy and initiatives. I have never discussed with her any NAS matter that was likely to come before the supreme court,” he said.TopicsUS supreme courtUS politicsLaw (US)The far rightRacefeaturesReuse this content More

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      Can Biden prevent a war with Russia? Politics Weekly podcast

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      Jonathan Freedland and Julian Borger discuss Joe Biden’s strategy when it comes to potential war with Russia over Ukraine, as well as some potentially good news at home for the president as he gets the chance to nominate a liberal pick to the supreme court

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      Archive: BBC, WION, CSPAN, CBS Buy tickets for Hettie Judah’s Guardian livestreamed conversation with the artist Lubaina Himid. Send your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com. Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts. More

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      Biden to nominate first Black woman to sit on supreme court by end of February

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      Biden to nominate first Black woman to sit on supreme court by end of FebruaryUS president announced plans for court at White House event marking retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer01:04Joe Biden intends to announce his nominee to become the first Black woman to sit on the US supreme court by the end of February, the president said on Thursday at a formal White House event to mark the retirement of the liberal-leaning justice Stephen Breyer.Lauding the retiring justice as a “beacon of wisdom” and a “model public servant at a time of great division in this country”, Biden pledged to replace him with someone worthy of Breyer’s “legacy of excellence and decency”. He said the nominee would have “extraordinary qualifications, character, experience and integrity, and that person will be the first Black woman ever nominated to the United States supreme court.”He added: “It is long overdue in my view.”Biden’s confirmation that he is still studying the résumés of candidates and has yet to make his pick will do little to settle nerves among progressives still smarting from Donald Trump’s three supreme court appointments. Many Democrats want the president to emulate the warp speed with which the Trump administration drove through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett in less than six weeks following Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death in September 2020.The Washington Post, citing an anonymous source, said that the majority leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, is aiming for a similar timeline.Replacing Breyer with a like-minded justice is seen by many Democrats as critical in preserving the already beleaguered rump of liberals on the bench. The retiring justice is one of only three such individuals on the nine-justice court, and they are so outnumbered that the country now faces drastic changes in several key areas from abortion to guns and affirmative action.Despite the pressure for haste among his party’s members, Biden insisted that he would be “rigorous” in choosing the nominee. He would listen to advice from senators and meet candidates, indicating a selection process that is likely to take weeks not days.For his part, Justice Breyer is hoping that his successor can be confirmed and in place within the next six months. In his formal retirement letter to Biden, he said he would step down at the start of the court’s summer recess in June or July, “assuming that by then my successor has been nominated and confirmed”.Speaking in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Breyer made a lyrical paean to American unity. Recalling a speech he likes to deliver to school students, he said that the US was an experiment that is still going on.“My children and grandchildren will determine whether the experiment will last, and as an optimist I’m pretty sure that it will,” he said.Biden first committed himself to promoting a Black woman to the nation’s highest court at a presidential debate against Trump during the 2020 presidential campaign. The promise was reportedly made after intense prodding by the prominent South Carolina Democrat Jim Clyburn, who endorsed Biden the following day in a move that helped propel him into the White House.Though the race is now on to confirm Breyer’s replacement before the court’s term reaches its summer recess, there are large hurdles ahead. Looming over the proceedings is the evenly divided 50-50 split in the US Senate, the chamber that will preside over the confirmation hearings of whomsoever Biden picks.The Democrats hold the casting vote with Vice-President Kamala Harris, but they will need to keep all 50 senators on board during the process. That is a challenge that has eluded the Biden administration in recent months with the high-profile defections of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema over vital issues ranging from the president’s Build Back Better legislation to overcoming the filibuster to secure essential voting rights reforms.To reduce any risk of Democratic splits, Schumer will also be looking to lure Republican moderates such as Susan Collins from Maine and Lisa Murkowski from Alaska to their side.Then there are the nationwide midterm elections in November which will inevitably place a partisan political pall over the confirmation process. Republicans have already begun to test out lines of attack, predicting that Biden’s nominee will be, in the words of the senator from Florida Rick Scott, “a radical liberal with extremist views”.Rightwing Twitter feeds have also lit up with claims that Biden’s choice of a Black woman would constitute unlawful sex and race discrimination. Those playing the affirmative-action card were forgetting that in 1980 Ronald Reagan pledged to pick the first woman to sit on the nation’s highest court, appointing Sandra Day O’Connor the following year.Republican leaders will be hoping that by portraying Biden’s choice as a culture wars threat to American values they will help to drive out the party’s base to the polling booths on 8 November.Similar calculations will be at play on the Democratic side. Party strategists will want to leverage the nomination of a Black woman as an energizing factor at the polls for important elements of its electorate who include African Americans, women and progressive voters. TopicsUS supreme courtJoe BidenLaw (US)US politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Liberals across America sigh with relief about Justice Breyer’s retirement | Moira Donegan

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      Liberals across America are sighing with relief about Justice Breyer’s retirementMoira DoneganThe 83-year-old US supreme court justice is stepping down – and allowing Biden to chose a successor before the midterms. Thank God for that That sound you hear is Democrats in Washington and across the country letting out a sigh of profound relief: Associate Justice Stephen Breyer is retiring in June, at the end of the US supreme court’s current term. News of the 83-year-old’s choice to step down broke on Wednesday – evidently a little earlier than the man himself would have liked – giving Joe Biden his first opportunity to fill a vacancy on the nation’s highest court.The decision from Breyer ends months of speculation and a determined pressure campaign to convince the ageing liberal justice to retire while Democrats still held both the White House and the Senate, that rare and precarious circumstance that is now required for any Democratic president to see his federal court nominees confirmed. Breyer’s decision to step down this summer gives the Democrats a narrow window to appoint his replacement before they are expected to lose control of the Senate in the November midterms.There is no doubt any more: the US supreme court is run by ‘partisan hacks’ | Robert ReichRead moreBreyer’s retirement, after nearly 30 years as a justice, will not change the balance of power on the supreme court, which has heaved dramatically rightward since Justice Anthony Kennedy chose to retire under Donald Trump in 2018. Nor will his exit mitigate what are likely to be ruinous outcomes in this term’s major rulings, which include the hateful Dobbs v Jackson, the case that is almost certain to overturn Roe v Wade. The benefits of his timely exit aren’t so much ameliorative as preventive: because he has retired under a Democratic trifecta, he has ensured that the supreme court’s conservative 6-3 supermajority will at least stay 6-3, and not become and insurmountable 7-2. But the extremist makeup of an increasingly maximalist rightwing court will continue.What his retirement does bring to an end is a long legal and political career of the kind that has since become unfeasible. Breyer’s early career was marked by the industrious bipartisanship of the latter 20th century, and he helped shape that era’s neoliberal consensus.When he was young, Breyer was a legal academic at Harvard – read any biography of a federal courts judge and the words “legal academic at Harvard” are likely to appear –and he wrote inventively about the prerogatives of executive agencies, a field known as administrative law. He favored deregulation, and took several leaves of absence from teaching throughout the 1970s to work as a special counsel to Democrats in the US Senate; among his accomplishments there was shepherding the deregulation of the airline industry.He gained a reputation for friendliness and a willingness to negotiate, and as this was in keeping with the social norms of Washington at the time, he was close with a number of Republicans. His children played with the children of the segregationist Republican senator Strom Thurmond. This closeness with men on the other side of the aisle paid off: when President Clinton nominated Breyer to the supreme court in 1994, he was confirmed 87 to 9.On the court itself, Breyer exerted his influence primarily in conference, attempting to extract compromises from his conservative colleagues and to cultivate their more moderate impulses. His colleagues on the left, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and later Sonia Sotomayor, took up the role first crafted by Thurgood Marshall, and wrote passionate dissents to conservative rulings that were meant to sway the public as much as the legal community. This was not Breyer’s style; he was nearly always speaking to other lawyers, not to lay people. We don’t know how much this worked – the justice’s conferences are confidential – but it is entirely possible that as the court shifted right over the course of his tenure, it was Breyer whose private arguments helped slow its lurch.But as the court and the nation became more polarized, Breyer had come to seem out of place. His commitment to persuasion was no match for a 6-3 court packed with conservative ideologues; his passionate belief in legislative power did not fit with the realities of a deadlocked and dysfunctional Congress that increasingly delegated policymaking power to the judiciary. His questions – always famous for their long-windedness and convoluted structure – devolved into meandering soliloquies, and on the audio broadcasts of the court’s oral arguments, his liberal colleagues Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor could often be heard trying to nudge him towards conclusion or clarify his point. It was obvious that he was from another time, and that time has now ended. The best thing he could have done for the country was go, and it is to his credit that he did.What comes next? On the campaign trail, candidate Biden promised to appoint a Black woman to the court, and the likeliest candidate is Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former Breyer clerk who has the justice’s blessing and whose promotion to the DC circuit court of appeals last June was seen as a stepping stone to succeed her former boss. She is 51, and could serve on the court for decades.But, if she is appointed, the institution that awaits Judge Brown Jackson is less collegial and less dignified than the one that welcomed Breyer. Despite the increasingly laughable protestations of its conservative wing, the supreme court has become an all but nakedly political body, frequently warping the law in bizarre and inventive ways to ensure outcomes that align with Republican priorities. They are going to dispose of abortion rights this year. Affirmative action is set to be dismantled. Voting rights have already been shockingly eroded, and the conservatives seem intent on interpreting religious freedom rights for Christians in whichever way can secure the maximum injury and indignity for everybody else.Increasingly, the impression left by the justices themselves is one of vain and petty figures, fixated on their own PR, attempting to maintain the solemn mystique of an institution that has long since lost it. Who would want to join such a workplace? Perhaps Judge Brown Jackson, if she does indeed become the nominee, deserves not only our congratulations, but also our condolences.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
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