With the Supreme Court recently making news (and displeasing conservatives) in cases on gun rights and environmental over-regulation, now is a good time for the court to become a major part of the presidential campaign. Just as Donald Trump did in May of 2016, Joe Biden soon ought to release his own list of potential high-court nominees.
Liberal groups already are pressing Biden to do so, saying a good list will galvanize the Democratic voter base and help Biden win. Ironically, conservative court activists such as Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network are joining the chorus, saying that if Biden fails to put forth a public list, he will be playing “hide the ball.”
These spectrumwide calls for a Biden judge list show that each side thinks judicial selections play to its own political advantage. They also indicate that more and more people recognize that judicial selections are among a president’s most important powers, and discussion of judicial philosophy ought to be a major part of any presidential campaign.
Well, bring it on! From an idealistic “good government” standpoint, public debate about the importance and direction of the federal courts is a good opportunity for civic education in a nation where citizens are woefully ignorant of civics and history.
Moreover, I and other constitutional conservatives for years have been confident that most U.S. citizens intuitively and rationally favor a conservative approach to jurisprudence. If leftist activists believe the opposite, more power to them. If Biden, who has helped smear Republican judicial nominees for years, has any courage, he’ll take the challenge and release his own list. Let’s see if he can defend their jurisprudence in a way that appeals to most U.S. citizens. Let’s see if he can catalyze more voters for his potential nominees than against them. If he can’t, he shouldn’t be president.
Indeed, the public has even more reason to expect Biden to release a list than they would from any other candidate. After all, Biden almost certainly earned more attention during his career for his chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee than for any other legislative topic, and he often has bragged that he “presided over more Supreme Court hearings than anyone.” If there is anything on which he, of all people, should be willing to stake his reputation, it is his preference for judicial nominees.
Trump boldly broke precedent by releasing his list of possible nominees. When he expanded the list in September 2016, he said it was “definitive” that his first nominee would come from that list — and indeed, it did, with Neil Gorsuch being among the final 21. That took guts. Does Biden also have guts?
Long-standing reports say that leftist groups already have a “secret list” of potential nominees. It will insist the Democratic nominee embrace. Will Biden choose from that list? Voters have a right to know if there are names under consideration such as Judge Edward Chen, who in speeches has said the United States in inexorably awash with “irresistible forces of racism, nativism and scapegoating,” and that a judge should draw on his own “ethnic and racial background” when deciding cases.”
Or maybe Michelle Alexander, on the Left’s shortlist, who believes “not even working for some form of political revolution” is enough, because we need an agenda that “shakes the foundations of our unjust political, legal and economics systems, and ushers in a new America.”
If these are the sorts of justices Biden has planned for us, he should tell us. It will be even more telling, and ominous if he doesn’t want us to know at all.
