While President Trump and Senate Republicans push forward in their attempt to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Joe Biden wants the seat to stay open, assuming he’ll be elected in November. But if Biden wants to be the one to fill the seat, the first thing he should do is release his list of candidates.
Trump has been completely transparent on potential Supreme Court nominees since before he was even elected. Neil Gorsuch was on the list of candidates Trump released in September of 2016. Brett Kavanaugh was added to the list in November of 2017, seven months before Anthony Kennedy’s retirement. Judge Amy Coney Barrett was also added to the list in that November update, nearly three years before her nomination.
By comparison, Biden is taking the Hillary Clinton route of keeping the list under wraps. But even names expected to be on Clinton’s list floated around ahead of the 2016 election. Biden has already made up his mind to select his nominee through affirmative action, guaranteeing he would pick a black woman but not putting forward any names.
Biden has said that he wouldn’t want his list of candidates to be attacked, or for it to influence their decision making from the bench. And yet neither of those have appeared to have happened with the lists put forward by Trump. Stretching for a third reason, Biden said he would make his pick only after speaking to Republicans and Democrats in the Senate, which doesn’t explain why he can’t release a list of the people he will be discussing.
The Supreme Court was certainly a factor in Trump’s 2016 victory, and Biden himself has said, “The American people know the U.S. Supreme Court decisions affect their everyday lives.” Yet he has no interest in letting the American public know who he could potentially appoint to the high court. Telling the American people you want a self-imposed racial quota is not good enough.
Biden’s absentee campaign has been predicated on the simple fact that he’s not Trump and that the less info he gives to the public the better. That might end up being good enough to win the election, but it’s not good enough to prevent the eminently qualified Barrett from being confirmed to the Supreme Court. If Biden wants to convince the American people otherwise, he owes them his own list of potential nominees.
