Let the opining begin

Justice Stephen Breyer is retiring. We all understand that he's doing so in order that Joe Biden can get a liberal judge on the court while the getting is good. We also understand that Trump's nominees were not only ultra-conservative, they were young in order that there would be ultra-conservatives on the court for years to come. We also all understand that the Supreme Court is political, regardless of claims to the contrary.

The Washington Post has published an editorial opinion about how Biden should handle this situation. Please recall that Biden ran on the promise that if he got a chance to nominate a justice it would be a black woman.

From the Post:  

Justice Stephen G. Breyer will retire at the end of the Supreme Court’s current term, concluding a nearly three-decade career as one of the nation’s top judges — and giving President Biden a rare chance to shape the judicial branch. Mr. Biden should resist partisan pressure to place the youngest, most ideologically strident judge on the high court. Instead, he should pick the best candidate for the job.

The first and foremost qualification — a commitment to judicial independence — is the opposite of what many progressive activists desire.

  WaPo

I highly doubt it's the opposite of what they desire. One wonders: did the Post offer the same opinion when Trump nominated any of the three ultra-conservatives during his one term? I'm not going to research that. I'm going to hope they did.

Mr. Biden has himself suggested another reasonable consideration: diversity, pledging during his presidential campaign to nominate a Black woman for the job. This would be a welcome first, and there are well-qualified Black women on the federal bench whom he could promote. But the president also should not feel restricted to the pool of candidates serving on appeals courts, from which every sitting justice but one hails. Some of the nation’s best justices traveled different paths to the court.

For their part, Republicans should give Mr. Biden’s pick a fair shake. This might seem like a fantasy. The hardball they played in recent years to force a 6-to-3 conservative court majority did more to poison the judicial nomination process and politicize the court than any act since President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to pack it. They would harm the country even more if they now condemned a qualified Black female nominee as a radical.

[...]

The nation’s leaders should consider ways to reduce the high stakes of any single Supreme Court pick and cut the element of luck that determines which president gets to decide the court’s composition. Imposing 18-year term limits would do both. Along with Mr. Biden’s nominee, lawmakers should consider this idea with open minds.

That is absolutely right. Term limits are obviously needed. On the other hand, there's an even better solution: floating number of justices. Perhaps combine that with term limits.

Also, I'm not too concerned about Republicans giving Biden's pick "a fair shake."  They have a whopping majority of their idealogues on the bench.  Even if Roberts - or rarely Kavanaugh - vote in a non-idealogical way, it would take both of them at the same time to side with the "liberals" to thwart a conservative outcome, and that's highly unlikely to happen.  When it comes to things really important to Republicans - abortion, immigration and corporate power - there's no question which way the Court will go.  They can afford to look as though they're not obstructionists on this vote.

At any rate, it's a good idea to look at the Post's op-ed from the view of a non-white person.

Michael Harriott has a long Twitter thread doing just that. He begins...

Continue reading.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

UPDATE: