Regardless of whom President Joe Biden nominates to the Supreme Court, the way he is going about it is all wrong, according to Harvard Law...
Regardless of whom President Joe Biden nominates to the Supreme Court, the way he is going about it is all wrong, according to Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz.
During an appearance on the Fox News show “Sunday Morning Futures,” Dershowitz slammed Biden for pledging during his presidential campaign that he would only nominate a black woman to the court to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, a member of the court’s liberal wing.
“Race and gender should never play a role in the selection process,” Dershowitz said, summing up the case.
During the show. Dershowitz said Biden may be throwing the Constitution to the winds by putting a race and gender qualification on his selection.
“I think it may be unconstitutional,” Dershowitz said.
“If he had said he was going to appoint … the first Muslim to the court, that would be unconstitutional. Because the Constitution, Article 6, specifically provides that no religious test should ever be required. I think the 14th and 19th Amendments also extend that to no racial or gender tests,” he said.
Dershowitz said Biden should pick the best nominee possible, period.
“Nobody should ever be excluded because they don’t fit a racial or gender criteria,” he said.
“There are enormous numbers of qualified black judges and professors who would make great appointees to the Supreme Court. And I would applaud if the president picked somebody who also fit those criteria,” he said.
Dershowitz noted that reverse discrimination remains a form of discrimination.
“But to announce in advance, no whites, no males need apply, brings us back to the days when the Supreme Court was exclusively a white male institution,” he said.
And then there were the eight words that state the argument succinctly: “Race and gender should never play a role.”
Others have also criticized Biden for limiting his choices in advance.
“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,” Republican Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi said Friday, according to Fox News.
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