United States Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer announced his retirement last week. (Or, more accurately, his announcement was leaked by President Joe Biden's Chief of Staff Ron Klain, months before Breyer planned to announce it himself.)
Breyer is part of the Court's liberal faction, so his replacement, named by a Democrat president, is unlikely to change the outcome of cases. Even so, Biden wasted no time proclaiming that he intended to make good on a campaign promise to appoint the first Black female Supreme Court justice.
The last person who should be bragging about his commitment to advancing the cause of minorities in the judiciary is Joe Biden.
When Clarence Thomas, a Black lawyer and the chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, was nominated by President George H.W. Bush to the Supreme Court in 1991, then-Sen. Biden was the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Thomas was set to become only the second Black Supreme Court justice, after Thurgood Marshall. Yet Biden went to elaborate lengths trying to derail Thomas' confirmation.
He made wild accusations against Thomas, misquoted his writings and allowed the confirmation hearings to be turned into a circus of unsubstantiated character assassination.
Thomas was not the only victim of Biden's conveniently fluctuating commitment to racial justice. Biden blocked President George W. Bush's 2003 nomination of Janice Rogers Brown, a Black woman and a California Supreme Court justice, to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
With a filibuster, no less. When Bush nominated Brown again in 2005, Biden voted against her. (She was nevertheless confirmed.)
Two years earlier, in 2001, Biden and his fellow Democrats in the Senate had blocked the confirmation of another Bush 2 appointee, Miguel Estrada, to the D.C. Circuit; again, with a filibuster. (Biden has called the Senate filibuster a "relic of the Jim Crow era." I guess he'd know.)
The D.C. Circuit is a proving ground for Supreme Court nominees. Did Biden and the Senate Democrats obstruct the path of two prominent and accomplished minority lawyers to the Supreme Court because they're inveterate racists?
Republicans would like you to think so. GOP politicians and conservative pundits love to play this game. They denounced Biden's SCOTUS selection criteria as "racial discrimination," insulting to Blacks, and so on.
But it's pointless and stupid for the political Right to point out that the Left isn't playing by its own rules. Because everyone knows those aren't the real rules.
Supreme Court appointments, like so many other political issues these days, aren't really about racial or ethnic diversity; they're about ideology. Everything else is just theater and window dressing.
If advancing the careers and promoting talented but underrepresented minorities were Democrats' primary objectives, Brown and Estrada would have sailed through their confirmation hearings.
Democrats certainly didn't want a Republican president to get credit for placing the first Black woman and first Hispanic on the nation's highest court. But the real reason is because those nominees, like Thomas, are considered "conservative."
For decades, Democrats have blocked "conservative" minority judicial nominees, just like they attack conservative minority political candidates such as Winsome Sears and Larry Elder, because the existence of conservative minorities destroys left-wing narratives that all conservatives are racists (and are all "white") and that the Democratic Party, especially its progressive wing, is the salvation of minorities in this country.
But today's Democratic Party, which has been almost completely co-opted by its far-left faction, wants more. They want politicians who will dismantle the underpinnings of the country, and jurists who will approve it.
Some say so openly. America needs to be taken down to the studs because everything here is grounded in "systemic racism."
That, too, is a lie. America was not founded to perpetuate racism, as even the most cursory familiarity with the debates of the Constitutional Convention make clear.
What's more, plenty of the grifters shilling for this viewpoint don't really believe it; it's just a power grab and a ploy for money. Consider the $60 million the Black Lives Matter organization raised in 2020 that is currently unaccounted for, not to mention the four homes that Patrisse Cullors, former BLM head, purchased for several million dollars.
Or the 10,000 square foot mansion that Cullors' wife Janaya Khan purchased in Toronto for $6.3 million. (Khan and Cullors call themselves "trained Marxists." Well-trained, apparently; the Toronto estate was once the headquarters of the Communist Party of Canada. You can't make this stuff up.)
But grifters or true believers, what today's uber-leftists are attacking is individual liberty, Judeo-Christianity, sexual self-restraint, the nuclear family, the Constitution and just about everything else that limits government control over the average person.
They'll tell you they're attacking "racism" and demand that you become an "anti-racist." But while you're prostrating yourself, calling yourself a "humble learner and an "anti-racist," they're busy redefining "racism" to be everything good and decent about America:
Election integrity legislation (like voter ID) is racism. Banking and financial regulation is racism. Parental participation in their children's school is racism. Judeo-Christianity is racism. Freedom of speech is racism. The Electoral College is racism.
The balance of power in the House and Senate is racism. The free market is racism. Private property is racism. A secure border is racism. Law enforcement is racism. Safety in our cities is racism.
Before you know it, you're now "anti" everything you own, everything you have the freedom to do, everything you believe in.
The people pushing to take control over you, your children, your families, your schools, your property, your business, your religion, your safety, your right to defend yourself and your country want justices on the Supreme Court who will uphold everything they do.
And they don't give a d**n what color they are.
Laura Hollis is a professor of teaching at the Mendoza College of Business, as well as a professor of business law and entrepreneurship at Notre Dame. Her career as an attorney has spanned 35 plus years. Her legal publications have appeared in the Temple Law Review, Cardozo Law Review, and the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy. Dr. Hollis has been a freelance political writer since 1993, writing for The Detroit News, HOUR Detroit magazine, Townhall.com, and the Christian Post. Read Reports by Prof. Hollis — More Here.