That didn’t take long

You may remember Ilya Shapiro from such recent LGM posts as Rich Lawyer Panhandles For Free Legal Work in Order to Send His Kids to School Without Masks. Shapiro got hired last week by Georgetown’s law school, to handle Randy Barnett’s Center For Reactionary Politics in the Guise of Legal Interpretation. He’s doing his best to drum up some publicity for himself as he moves up (?) in the legal world:

Note that Shapiro was appalled by Obama’s choice of Sonia Sotomayor back in 2009, given it was so obvious that she was chosen despite her weak credentials, because she was Hispanic.

As Stern points out, Sotomayor in fact checked all the current credentialing boxes, as absurdly narrow as they are, to the extent that anybody can: Princeton summa, Yale Law Review, DANY prosecutor, 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. But of course she got all those things because she was a girl from the projects, even though she wasn’t very smart. Just ask Jeff Rosen!

The funny thing here is that, in terms of actual career achievement, Sotomayor was a vastly more impressive candidate than Elena I got the Blow Off from Chicago But It’s Good to Have Friends Like Larry Summers Kagan, but guess who Shapiro nominated as a “truly qualified” candidate in comparison to Affirmative Action Baby Sotomayor? Yup you guessed correctly! And guess who also loved the Kagan nomination? It’s just one coincidence after another with these guys.

This isn’t really meant as a slam on Kagan, who has turned out to be fine. (If anything this in itself is just further evidence of how. idiotic these credentialing contests are). But the notion that Kagan was obviously more “qualified” than Sotomayor in 2009 is as pure example of racist distortion of supposedly objective criteria as you will ever see.

Now Shapiro has blown past his previous achievements in this crowded field by condemning the not very bright black woman that Biden is going to choose even before he’s chosen her. Because . . . You know.

If you want to see something really funny, check out Andrew Totally Not Racist Sullivan leaping to Shapiro’s defense, by claiming that it’s Stern who is jumping to inquisitorial-like conclusions, not Shapiro:

This would seem to be taking the whole EAIAC thing to a point that I just want to rage quit this whole series, except it turns out to be entitled Reality.

Shapiro’s in your face racism is just a particularly stark example the whole merit myth, as I was discussing earlier today, in which SCOTUS seats are putatively parceled out to the “smartest” people, like it’s some sort of goddamned SAT test.

And you know who does really well on those tests? The naturally smart people, like Asians and Jews. Just ask Dinesh D’Souza and Jared Kushner!

Blech.

. . . I notice GULC dean Bill Treanor has sent off an “outraged” statement, claiming that Shapiro’s tweet does not represent the values blah blah blah.

Somebody should ask him exactly who gave exactly how much money to GULC to induce Treanor to hire Shapiro to run Barnett’s vanity operation, with zero input from the rest of the GULC faculty.

Any GULC alums in the LGM readership?