President Biden, in typically demented fashion, has vowed to nominate the first black woman to the Supreme Court (everybody else, no mater of qualifications can go pack sand).
For schitz and giggles, let us return to 2003, when Bush nominated Judge Janice Rogers Brown to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The D.C. Circuit is considered the country’s second-most important court, and has produced more Supreme Court justices than any other federal court.
Brown was immediately hailed as a potential Supreme Court nominee. She was highly qualified, having served for seven years as an associate justice of the California Supreme Court — the first Black woman to do so.
She was the daughter and granddaughter of sharecroppers, and grew up in rural Alabama during the dark days of segregation, when her family refused to enter restaurants or theaters with separate entrances for Black customers. She rose from poverty and put herself through college and UCLA law school as a working single mother. She was a self-made African American legal star.
However, she was a conservative, and Biden set out to destroy her.
Democrats argued that she was out of the legal mainstream, but Republicans responded that she had written more majority opinions than any other justice on the California Supreme Court — and she was reelected with 76% of the vote, the highest percentage of all the justices on the ballot.
In his speech opposing Rogers Brown, Biden gave a verbal nod to then-Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.V. – a prolific filibusterer – and said the vote on the jurist’s nomination would be “the single-most significant vote any one of us will cast in my 32 years in the Senate.”
“I suspect [Byrd] would agree with that,” Biden said. Obama later labeled Rogers Brown a “political activist.”
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And still I persist in wondering exactly why it is that ANYONE out there could possibly mistake Joe Biden for someone with a working brain who was sane and rational and lucid.