Joe Biden’s Supreme Court shortlist: White people need not apply

“I’m looking forward to making sure there’s a black woman on the Supreme Court,” he said on the Democratic debate stage in February. “I’d push very hard for that.”

At a press conference in June, Biden said, “We are putting together a list of African American women who are qualified and have the experience to be on the court.”

Biden has maintained this commitment. In a Sunday press conference addressing Ginsburg’s passing, he reiterated his promise that if he is allowed to fill the seat, he will select an African American woman. Vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris has also confirmed this pledge.

To be clear, there are surely many African American women, both liberal and conservative, who are qualified to sit on the Supreme Court and would make for excellent nominees. But Biden’s categorical rejection of all men and all non-black women for the slot is openly discriminatory and a rejection of meritocracy.

The Supreme Court is one of the most important institutions in our government. We need the best of the best filling such crucial roles, and categories such as race that are irrelevant to a justice’s ability to serve the nation well on the high court should never take precedence over merit-based criteria. For Biden to suggest otherwise is to elevate tokenism over the national interest.

Think about it like this.

On Sunday, Biden effusively praised Ginsburg’s legacy and hailed her as an iconic Supreme Court justice. Whether you agreed with her politically and philosophically or not, there’s no denying the truth in Biden’s praise. But his own identity-infused selection criteria would prohibit even Ginsburg from filling the seat! As a white Jewish woman, Ginsburg herself wouldn’t check enough identity boxes to make Biden’s Supreme Court shortlist.

This rigid use of race as a qualification doesn’t help diversity; in fact, it would hurt whatever African American woman Biden ended up selecting. She would no doubt be qualified in her own right but would be forever viewed as a token diversity pick. She would go down in history not as a trailblazer but as the token black woman Biden picked after disqualifying most of the candidate pool through identity politics. This would be an undeserved insult to the potential nominee, who may well have been selected anyway on her own merits in an open process.

It was no less a visionary than Martin Luther King Jr., who imagined a country where all are judged on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Joe Biden’s explicit use of race and gender as disqualifiers for the high court is a slap in the face to that egalitarian vision.

Reducing your Supreme Court nominee to their race and gender might pass for “woke” these days. But even though it’s being done by Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, it’s surely not “progressive” in any meaningful sense of the word.

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a freelance journalist and Washington Examiner contributor.