The SCOTUS is plenty inbred without making a virtue of institutional incest. It wasn't always so. Hugo Black was a Senator. Earl Warren was a Governor. (And BTW, neither had had either moral or scholastic records to be especially proud of.) William O. Douglas was chairman of the SEC.
John Marshall was an envoy to France, a Congressman an…
The SCOTUS is plenty inbred without making a virtue of institutional incest. It wasn't always so. Hugo Black was a Senator. Earl Warren was a Governor. (And BTW, neither had had either moral or scholastic records to be especially proud of.) William O. Douglas was chairman of the SEC.
John Marshall was an envoy to France, a Congressman and Secretary of State.
Add the fetish of narrow educational credentialism (in an era of steadily declining overall academic standards, no less) and the Court is arguably as parochial as it has ever been.
Under the circumstances the problem is not that Biden wants to nominate a black woman, but that he'll probably choose exactly the kind of person that presidents have been robotically nominating for decades.
The SCOTUS is plenty inbred without making a virtue of institutional incest. It wasn't always so. Hugo Black was a Senator. Earl Warren was a Governor. (And BTW, neither had had either moral or scholastic records to be especially proud of.) William O. Douglas was chairman of the SEC.
John Marshall was an envoy to France, a Congressman and Secretary of State.
Add the fetish of narrow educational credentialism (in an era of steadily declining overall academic standards, no less) and the Court is arguably as parochial as it has ever been.
Under the circumstances the problem is not that Biden wants to nominate a black woman, but that he'll probably choose exactly the kind of person that presidents have been robotically nominating for decades.