Their little games
By 
Both the most and least recent Republican Supreme Court nominees were selected of a pool of exactly one serious candidate, for purely “identity” reasons, with zero opposition from elite Republicans. And yet they’re just going to keep pretending that Joe Biden invented this longstanding and unexceptionable practice and to be offended by it:
This is a non-apology. Presidents of both parties in recent decades, and from the beginning of American history, have chosen justices based on “identity.” You don’t get to say something racist and then complain about identity politics. https://t.co/0669FrtNZM— Blake Emerson (@BlakeProf) January 29, 2022
This is becoming a common Respectable Conservative criticism of the Biden Supreme Court pledge, and thinking of it as good or smart requires the word “some” to do a tremendous amount of work pic.twitter.com/6id3VlZb3J— Jay Willis (@jaywillis) January 29, 2022
What kills me is that Shapiro et al. could stop stepping on rakes if they would just admit that the reason they want Biden to nominate Srinivasan is because he’s the most conservative possible nominee from a Democratic president. They would rather say things that are both racist and intelligence-insultingly false than admit that they won’t like Biden’s nominee on ideological grounds. Instead they’re going to say that Ketanji Brown Jackson is “unqualified,” when there is no non-racist way to defend that claim. Elite lawyer brain is something else.
The larger issue here, of course, is that Republican elites will feel compelled to argue that being a Supreme Court justice is a position involving highly technical skills possessed only by a tiny handful of people, because the Republican Supreme Court is about to impose a lot of highly unpopular policies on the American public.
At any given time there are only 4-5 people in America with the intellectual fire power to be a Supreme Court Justice. 3 of them happen to be at this FedSoc panel titled "Repealing the 15th Amendment: Pros and Cons"— Nicholas Wallace (@n1n2w3) January 27, 2022