Beyond Parody, Wendy Rogers Wants To Hold Off SCOTUS Pick Until 2024

There is no political satirist who could write anything more ridiculous than this. First of all, Jackson Lahmeyer is very concerned about a Supreme Court pick that is based on race or gender. He’s among the GOPers with complete amnesia. Ronald Reagan decided to nominate a woman, because it had never been done, and he picked Sandra Day O’Connor. George W. Bush felt he needed to nominate a black man to replace a black man and so he nominated Clarence Thomas to replace Thurgood Marshall.

About the only thing those two jurists have in common is their complexion. Justice Marshall was far and away the better intellect and, in my opinion, the better man. Thomas has never been able to fill his shoes.

Identity politics does have a downside. No one is disputing that. For example, if its firmly decided now, and it looks like it is, that this new justice must be female and Black, that gets away from a lot of great candidates who are only one or neither. Simply put, this is a year when Ruth Bader Ginsburg couldn’t get elevated to the bench, were she a candidate.

Put that way, it shows you the shortcomings of this kind of consideration in the appointment process. On the other hand, until somebody takes the actual step to appoint somebody from a class of persons who has never been represented on the court before, there’s no way to break through the discrimination barrier. And until that process is begun, the day cannot dawn where merit, only, is the consideration.

We don’t live in a perfect world and here these two buffoons are making things worse.

This is what you’re going to hear. Sheer hypocrisy. And as far as Wendy Rogers, there’s no way to even respond to this level of idiocy. To dignify it with a response is wrong, so I merely display it here for one and all to see.

And it’s not just these two. A columnist at the New York Times started tap dancing on this theme today.

The replacement will be chosen only after the field is radically winnowed by open race and sex discrimination, which have gone from being illegal to being celebrated and practiced by a president of the United States.https://t.co/nUYUvM6s2V

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) January 26, 2022

The plain fact of the matter is that this is a Catch-22. For so long, a woman or a POC could not be respected for their abilities or rewarded accordingly. You may recall that Sandra Day O’Connor couldn’t get a job as a lawyer after she graduated from law school. She was offered a job as a legal secretary.

The discrimination against women in law is phenomenal. The criminal justice center in downtown Los Angeles is named after Clara Shortridge Foltz. Her story is unbelievable. She was admitted to the California Bar in 1878, and that was because she was instrumental in lobbying for the law to be changed. At the time, the law read that any candidate for the Bar had to be 21 years old and a male. She introduced a bill to have that law changed and it was a firestorm. Bear in mind, what you’re about to read took place at a time when women didn’t even have the right to vote.

“The bill met with a storm of opposition such as had never been witnessed upon the floor of a California Senate,” Foltz wrote in her autobiography. Opponents said they feared that a female lawyer’s “seductive and persuasive arts” would sway juries. When they were lawyers, women would next demand to become jurors and even judges.

Others painted a picture of a female lawyer blushing and stammering when she had to cross-examine a witness on a sexual matter. The bill failed to pass initially. Assembly member Grove Johnson orchestrated a reconsideration of the Woman Lawyer’s Bill for the last day of March, two days before the end of the session. During discussion, Johnson presented supporting petitions, including one signed by nearly the entire Sacramento Bar, including judges.

The bill passed by two votes, with a final count of 37 to 35 on March 29, 1878. However, it appeared the bill was set to die on Governor William Irwin’s desk if he did not sign it by midnight April 1, 1878. Unwilling to give up, Foltz slipped past two guards, entered Governor Irwin’s office and persuaded him to sign before the pending midnight deadline.

Once the bill passed, Foltz began her studies to take the California bar exam. Despite a frenzy of publicity, Foltz passed a three-hour oral bar exam on September 4, 1878, to become California’s first female lawyer. The next day, Foltz was admitted to the California State Bar. Though press at the time reported Foltz as the third, and in some papers, the fifth female attorney in the United States, Foltz joined the ranks of nearly a few dozen female attorneys, as there were no official records at the time.

Though she was already practicing law and had prevailed in numerous cases, Foltz and fellow suffragist peer Gordon enrolled with their $10 registration fee at the University of California’s Hastings College of Law in San Francisco on January 9, 1879. The women were permitted to enroll and attend, but not allowed to stay more than a few days.

In class, when Foltz coughed, turned a page or moved her chair, her male classmates, not pleased by her presence, did the same in mimic. At the end of the third day, Foltz received a letter from the registrar dated January 10, 1879, informing her that the directors had “resolved not to admit women to the Law School.”

When you look back on this insane level of discrimination women have experienced, it makes sense that it was a revolutionary act on Ronald Reagan’s part to nominate Sandra Day O’Connor. And what Joe Biden is about to do makes sense, too.

I concur that merit only should be the standard by which a candidate is elevated to the bench. I even concur that whichever Black women Joe Biden decides to choose may not be the absolute best candidate for the job. There may be somebody else who would be better but who will not be considered because this attempt to redress past discrimination is being made.

But if anybody wants to say that whomever Biden chooses is somehow getting a break, having it handed to them, no way. Not on these facts. Not on what women have had to go through in this life.

There’s an expression, “A woman has to work twice as hard as a man to be thought half as good.” We’re not that far away from that sentiment. Misogyny is an evil, vicious thing. We’ve made remarkable progress since 1878 but we still have a long way to go.

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