.steve_vladeck joins OnTheIssuesPod with michelebgoodwin to give us a history lesson on Supreme Court justice demographics. Spoiler alert—there's been a lot of white men.
It is an important moment and I can’t help but think of Ruby Bridges. It’s been an image that’s come to mind over and over again. Seeing the image of a little girl, 5, 6 years old with Federal troopers, you know, escorting her to school to break down the barriers of segregation so that she could attend a school in Louisiana as the first Black child to do so.
For most of our history as Steve and Franita and Dean Holley-Walker mentioned, it was uniformly white and male and that goes for our lower courts as well. We are very much looking forward at ACS to having a first Black woman justice on the Supreme Court. And step back and think about that, in 2022. It’s past time.
And so, you know, when you asked the question, Michele, I mean, you know the answer, of course, right? Which is that there is a universe of people out there who just cannot accept this. Franita puts it that there are Black women who are and deserve to be and rightly should be in whatever the top tier is of how we are thinking about qualifications for the Supreme Court.
So, by having eight Black women nominated…only eight Black women have ever served on the appellate court before President Biden was elected and to have him nominate eight Black women, now the conversation has changed because we have more in the pipeline.
And that is no, you know, that’s no slam against the recent appointees, what it is, is a statement about do we understand what Black women have achieved in the legal profession. I think what we’re seeing is someone said they need to know the difference between a J.Crew catalog and the law. That just tells me there’s no understanding of who Black women are. Period, but especially in the legal profession.Yes.
So, you know, in that context where you have a quarter with no prior experience, where you have a majority with less than five years of prior judicial experience, the notion that someone…again, not the only person to talk about, but like Judge Jackson who has eight plus years of prior judicial experience plus her time before that as a public defender plus all of her other, I mean, like the notion that these are somehow not sufficient qualifications I think gives up the game that the folks who...
And so, I urge them to take a step back, think about what this moment means, and also put it into context. While it’s absolutely important to put a Black woman on this court for all sorts of reasons, at least from their perspective doing so is not going to change the makeup of the court where it is right now and so, it doesn’t cost them as much if you will, and so, I really encourage them to think about the legitimacy crisis that we’re facing.
It’s really outrageous. I think it’s outrageous in a sense that the Section II violation was quite clear and the lower court was quite thorough in sort of building the record to show that the violation was there and so, for the court to sort of come in at this stage of the proceedings and refuse to force the state legislature to redraw the maps is pretty outrageous.
Some of this gets lost in the technicalities of appellate procedure but there’s a remarkable footnote in Kavanaugh’s concurrence where he says, you know, Alabama has a chance of winning on the merits but of course, so do the plaintiffs, to which my response is, wait, like if it’s 50/50, like if you’re saying this is a close case on the merits, you are literally saying that Alabama has not carried its burden for showing that you need some kind of special protection before the election.
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