Daily Archives: 2 February 2022

The Supreme Court and Diversity

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Law Professor (University of Tennessee) Benjamin Barton thinks the Supreme Court needs diversity along many more dimensions than just race and sex, ostensibly to avoid groupthink.

Given that every justice is already a lawyer, it makes sense to try to diversify across other educational, geographic, and experiential axes.

Barton’s entire argument is a non sequitur.

The Supreme Court needs “diversity” far less than it needs Justices who will adhere to their oaths of office to defend and uphold our Constitution and to apply the laws equally to all Americans, without regard to any elements of “diversity.”

The Supreme Court needs Justices, in particular, who will accept the requirement of our Constitution’s Article I, Section 1, and who will rule based on what the Constitution and the statute before them in a particular case actually say, and not based on a Justice’s personal views of society’s needs.

Society’s needs are political matters that are solely within the provinces of the political branches of government and of We the People who elect the members of those branches. It is, after all, We the People who are society and so are the arbiters of our needs, and it is We the People who implement satisfaction of our needs through our individual actions and with the votes we cast to elect our representatives.

It’s Appropriate

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Senate Majority Whip and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D, IL) says it’s entirely appropriate to select a Supreme Court Justice first on the basis of her race and gender. He then says,

If they have achieved the level of success in the practice of law and jurisprudence, they’ve done it against great odds.

We’ll never know whether that’s true of President Joe Biden’s (D) nominee, though, since he’s made plain he’ll nominate on the basis of race and sex, and not on the basis of any level of success in the practice of law and jurisprudence.

But this degree of racism, much less of sexism, shouldn’t be a surprise from a party with a history of racist bigotry stretching back into the pre-Civil War years and today whose racist and sexist bigotry is demonstrated through Party’s insistence on proselytizing its identity politics.

As a side note, Durbin also justifies his President’s racist and sexist choice criteria on the claim that other Presidents did it, too. There’s the concept of morality with which we’re so familiar in the Progressive-Democratic Party and its predecessor, the Democratic Party: the morality of a behavior isn’t at all intrinsic in the behavior; on the contrary, morality is rooted in whether somebody else behaved that way, too; morality is a matter of situation, of what’s personally convenient to the behaver.