The first Black woman to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court in history will be a “beneficiary” of affirmative action, U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker told a radio show this afternoon. The senior Republican senator from Mississippi made clear that he has no plans to vote for Biden’s yet-to-be-announced pick.
Biden has vowed to select a Black woman to replace outgoing Justice Stephen Breyer, who announced his retirement yesterday.
“The irony is that the Supreme Court is at the very time hearing cases about this sort of affirmative racial discrimination while adding someone who is the beneficiary of this sort of quota,” Wicker told host Paul Gallo on SuperTalk Mississippi Radio today, referring to a pending U.S. Supreme Court case challenging affirmative action in college admissions.
“The majority of the court may be saying writ large that it’s unconstitutional. We’ll see how that irony works out.”
Wicker notably did not raise an objection when former President Donald Trump vowed to appoint a woman to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she died weeks before the 2020 election. Instead, the GOP senator enthusiastically supported Trump’s choice, Amy Coney Barrett, a white woman, despite having stated in 2016 that then-President Barack Obama should not be allowed to appoint a U.S. Supreme Court justice in an election year. Studies show that white women benefit more from affirmative action than any other group.
Nobody got more benefit from affirmative action than Barrett who had never tried a case and never argued a case before any court.
Wicker just another braindead Republican:
Despite not knowing who Biden will nominate, Mississippi’s senior senator predicted that Biden’s pick will be less palatable to Republicans like himself than the white, male justice who currently holds the seat. He compared the unannounced nominee to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who became the high court’s first Latina justice when former President Barack Obama appointed her in 2009.
“We’re going to go from a nice, stately liberal to someone who’s probably more in the style of Sonia Sotomayor,” Wicker said. “… I hope it’s at least someone who will at least not misrepresent the facts. I think they will misinterpret the law.”
Then, he lamented that more Republicans did not turn out to help re-elect former President Donald Trump in 2020.
“You know, for those people who vote Republican and were just a little uncomfortable voting for Trump last time because they had a problem with his demeanor, this is what you get. We’ll have 30 years of a left-wing judge when we could have had, at some point, another stellar member like the three we got recently, particularly Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh,” Wicker said, referring to two of the three white justices Trump appointed.
“I guarantee you this, Paul, this new justice will probably not get a single Republican vote, but we will not treat her like the Democrats did Brett Kavanaugh. It was one of the most disgraceful, shameful things and completely untruthful things that the Democratic Judiciary majority has ever, ever done.”
They are going to insult this nominee to her face by asking her to recuse herself from all affirmative action cases. You just know it. And they will do worse than that if they can. It will be a gross display of racism, sexism and partisanship. And, sadly, their voters will love it.
It won’t change anything. They’ll just do it for payback and feel absolutely triumphant if they are able to humiliate a highly qualified Black jurist before the whole country.