In the Washington Post today, Nick Mourtoupalas writes about something that hasn't gotten much attention: Joe Biden has appointed more non-white judges than any president in history. But to really see how dramatic Biden's tenure has been, you need to look at his annual appointment rate:
Biden is appointing non-white judges at more than twice the rate of Barack Obama and three times the rate of Bill Clinton.
And 63% of Biden's judges have been women. That's half again as many as Obama, who's in second place.
Put it together, and only 13% of Biden's judges have been white men. This is almost certainly not just a record, but a massive, over-the-top record.
It's also another example of something Biden has done that he can't really brag about too much because it would probably piss off lots of centrist white voters. Nonetheless, he's done it. It's easy to talk the talk, but Biden has walked the walk.
Now that's how you win close elections! Especially ones that determine the fate of democracy in this country. This will play really well in the battleground states where centrist white voters are a vanishing breed, so no need to even think about them..
Yes, Democrats should not act in accordance with their beliefs because if they acted like Democrats they can't win. After all, it's better to be in power and not use it than to be out of power and not be able to use it!
It is a part of Democratic belief that judicial appointments should not reflect the demographics of the nation?
Given the demographic makeup of the judges already serving on the bench, how do you know Biden's appointments aren't making the judiciary more reflective of the demographics of the nation? 63% of his appointments have been women, but I'd be willing to bet that 50% of our judges aren't women.
If you have an existing cadre of jurists which don’t match the demographics in one way, and “over appoint” in the other way to bring the total into agreement, you will end-up with overshoot as the initial cadre ages-out unless you swing the later appointments the back other way.
If instead, you appoint matching the demographics (and keep it that way) you will converge to the demographics without overshoot and a need to pendulum.
1) If you don't 'over-appoint', convergence to the population will take longer.
2) if you think a period of 'overshoot' is a bad thing, what did you think of a couple of centuries of massive overrepresentation of white males?
Given that Republicans will hold the presidency some of the time, convergence might never happen without a Democrat engaging in this sort of policy.
This!
Case in point. Trump appointed 57 judges to the federal appellate courts. Not one was Black.
Not. One.
Biden is simply making up for the vicious bigotry of the disgraceful Republican Party.
If, and indeed it is a big if, the appointments continue to match the demographics, it will take no more than roughly the average tenure of a jurist to converge.
As for the previous couple centuries, opinion of that matters if one wants to look backwards rather than forwards. But yes, it has been a very mixed bag.
Mixed? A mix of old white men and very old white men?
No, convergence would take nearly the maximum tenure of a judge to accomplish.
Your concern about "overshoot" is duly noted.
If it's any consolation, the likelihood of such an injustice ("too many" women, "too many" nonwhites) is low. Joe Biden will not be the only president appointing judges in the future, and other presidents, inc. Republicans (if we should be so lucky), will make sure that your scenario never happens.
The real overshoot today is Catholics, who hold 6.5 of 9 seats (Gorsuch is the .5) on the Supreme Court. Not bad for a denomination representing 23% of Americans.
That didn't happen because presidents wanted the Court to look like America, but to look the way Opus Dei member and longtime Federalist Society exec Leonard Leo would like America to look.
Or, not care about it reflecting the demographics of the country and just appoint the best judges.
Ding ding ding. Actual: 32% of Federal judges are women. For more info: https://www.abalegalprofile.com/judges.html#:~:text=1%2C%202021%2C%20to%20Oct.,of%20mixed%20race%20or%20ethnicity.
The question is, should the judiciary reflect the population? If so, then appoint qualified people who'll get you there.
Of course there's another question....if you don't consider Federalist Society members, what would be the percentage of while males in the pool of possible candidates?
The judiciary really can't reflect the population if only well qualified people are going to be appointed. One of the requirements of being a good judge is that you need to be smarter than the average person. The half of the population that is of below average intelligence is going to be unrepresented.
Paging G. Harrold Carswell .... Sen. Hruska on the line.
No, it is not. Biden is simply "catching up". Would you ask Reagan with his three per year about that?
[That was rhetorical. "Of course not" is the answer.]
I vote straight ticket Democrat, but it's not in "accordance with my beliefs" to discriminate against white men in hiring.
Regarding the pool of people who might qualify to be federal judges, 62% of lawyers in the US are white men. But somehow it's right if only 13% of Biden’s new judges are white men. If a business committed such blatant discrimination, they'd be getting sued and losing a lot of court cases.
Democrats should make up their minds. Either they support discrimination in hiring based on race and/or gender or they oppose it.
"But somehow it's right if only 13% of Biden’s new judges are white men. If a business committed such blatant discrimination, they'd be getting sued and losing a lot of court cases."
Offs. Are you personally a potential judge screwed out of a nomination that you were, for some reason, entitled to because you are a white man? If not, stfu.
Judges are public officers charged with administering the justice system. There are plenty of goddamned reasons why attempts to make the judiciary more reflective of the nation as a whole are important, and why the pool of all lawyers is not the yardstick by which the federal judiciary should be measured.
(Just one point among many: there are 1.3 million lawyers in the US, and fewer than 900 federal judgeships, of which Biden has appointed a few dozen).
Okay, I get it. You support discrimination in hiring based on race and gender. Then you list some excuses for why it is okay. In US history, people have always had a list of reasons why discrimination in hiring is okay for their particular institution or business.
You keep using the word "discrimination." What evidence do you have that white men are being discriminated against except that they are being picked by Biden at a lower rate than in the past? Was the past non-discriminatory, or just a different kind of discrimination?
So Biden's picks are 63% women. Does that seem way out of whack? Law school enrollment is about 56% women. Is that discrimination? What's the appropriate ratio that would prove absence of discrimination?
It's hard to say just looking at numbers. In my work days, I used to hire about 70% women when filling openings. Sales work, sometimes fairly technical, big corporation. I didn't aim to hire women disproportionately. I just looked to fill each spot with the best candidate for the job. Time and again, I found women were more qualified.
Why is that? Hard to say exactly. I wouldn't make a blanket statement like 'women are better than men.' But one explanation may be that the women in that field were from a more talented cohort of women in general than the men were compared to other men. In the job applicant pool, women tended to shine.
The same could be happening in law, a field that attracts a lot of women, especially those who are talented and committed. Men working in the field may tend to be more average.
Anyway, let's assume for these top jobs the "qualified" pool is fairly even for women and men. There's still a choice to make. Should you be "fair" to the potential judges and pick an equal number of women and men? Or should you be "fair" to the people who have business with the justice system -- the American public (with some cohorts being over-represented) -- by rectifying the imbalance in women and men serving as judges as expeditiously as possible?
"What evidence do you have that white men are being discriminated against except that they are being picked by Biden at a lower rate than in the past?"
Biden has specifically said he plans to pick judges who are not white men. That is pretty much what diverse hiring entails. So that is the clearly stated goal on Biden's part.
As I already noted, 62% of lawyers in the US are white men. And actually, these 62% of lawyers have more experience than average lawyers since they have been working longer. Presumably this implies that in the candidate pool for those who qualify to be federal judges, more than 62% are white males. You make the point that perhaps on average women can make better judges. Even if that was true, and women on average have a merit advantage, the odds that they are so superior that only 13% on new federal judges should be white male are pretty low.
"rectifying the imbalance in women and men"
If you do that deliberately, that means that many individual men (or individual women in other fields) are being deliberately discriminated against. I prefer to not have hiring policies designed around using discrimination as a tool.
Your concern is duly noted.
You may think discrimination in hiring is fine, as long as it's done the way you like. But it's an effective way for Republicans to shout 'hypocrisy" since the left was supposed to oppose discrimination.
Ronald Reagan promised to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court during his 1980 campaign, and he did. Long before that, presidents appointed Jews to the "Jewish seat" on the Supreme Court. Were those examples of "discrimination in hiring"?
What Joe Biden is doing in making appointments -- considering factors like race, gender, religion, etc., as part of a justice or judge's overall qualifications -- is nothing new.
We shouldn't pretend that the person appointed is the one-and-only best qualified person for the job. Truth is, there is a pool of probably a few dozen who are qualified and could serve. The process of selecting which person in that pool gets the pick is subject to many factors, including politics.
I don't think "discrimination" is the right word for it.
If an unqualified person is picked over a qualified one, then criticize that choice. Please provide evidence. But don't imply someone is unqualified because of their gender or race.
Sorry, I think discrimination is the right word. Ignoring race and gender, if you have a very large pool of potential candidates, and the selection of judges very much favors one race and/or gender, then there is obvious discrimination taking place.
Reagan was discriminating too. However, when this is done openly and transparently, and limited to specific acts, people don't mind. But Biden is discriminating systematically, continuously over four years, in the selection of new federal judges for the entire country.
I just made a comment above and I won't repeat the whole thing.
But one important point: your concern about "discrimination" is entirely based on appointing white men at a higher rate because their needs not to be discriminated against are paramount.
What about the needs of the American people not to be discriminated against by the justice system because there is an existing imbalance among judges in race or gender?
I believe there's a compelling case for rectifying existing imbalances. Race and gender of judges do have an effect on how justice is meted out. The sooner the judiciary looks like America, the sooner justice can be impartial.
If we were talking about some other government function, say, air traffic controllers, I'd say there's less a compelling need for a workplace that looks like America.
P.S.
Reagan was discriminating too. However, when this is done openly and transparently, and limited to specific acts, people don't mind. But Biden is discriminating systematically, continuously over four years...
You're being kind of ridiculous here, and I think your bending over backwards to excuse Reagan is giving your game away. Reagan (per the chart) was the most "discriminatory," appointing whites almost exclusively during his eight years. Reagan's one notable gender exception (O'Connor) does not excuse his bias in appointments. He (along with others) is responsible for the gender and race imbalances in the federal judiciary that Biden is now, belatedly, trying to remedy.
I find this discussion rather discouraging. If a party-line Democratic voter doesn't understand this, how is the rest of the country going to understand? Stop thinking in the sophistic frames that conservatives have been yelling about for ages. Please, or we're going to wind up in an authoritarian hellhole.
You only brought up the case where "Ronald Reagan promised to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court during his 1980 campaign, and he did." You made no mention of any other things Reagan did. So I only addressed that point. I'm not sure how this is "giving my game away".
"I find this discussion rather discouraging. If a party-line Democratic voter doesn't understand this, how is the rest of the country going to understand?"
I do understand what most liberals and progressives want. They want to use discrimination as a tool to rectify imbalances in gender and race in workplaces, including in federal appointment jobs. I get the appeal of this, but I just don't agree with this method for achieving better balances. I guess I'm stuck in the idealistic views of the 1960s when the goal was to stop using discrimination, period.
Well, gee, when white men have benefited from three centuries of affirmative action quotas, they might have to take a pause, dontcha think?
Or are we just supposed to ignore those three centuries of white male affirmative action quotas?
T-h-e-y n-e-v-e-r h-a-p-p-e-n-e-d!
Of course males have had advantages in American history. So to correct this, I assume your solution is to implement programs of hiring discrimination that benefit those are aren't white men. So discrimination is okay as long as the right people are being discriminated against. If this is your philosophy, fine, just say it. I just don't agree.
Our system has opened up in tremendous ways to let others besides white males advance. Women are 55% of law school graduates today. Ditto for med school graduates. Women will do just fine in their careers and the percentage of white males will naturally decline. These women don’t need discrimination as a tool to help them advance.
1) Presidents are not constrained to choose from the pool of ‘all lawyers’. Democrats may prefer candidates with specific experience, for example as a public defender, or a trial judge in a diverse community — pools which may have different demographics. Republicans have a revealed preference for lawyers and judges who are inclined to favor business interests, a pale lot in general.
2) The Burger Court, in Bakke and the Rehnquist Court, in Grutter v. Bollinger allowed some affirmative action policies.
1) Republicans and Democrats wanting to appoint judges with a preferred political philosophy is acceptable. That is just part of the way our system works. But appointing people based on their race or gender is entirely different, and that was Biden's clearly stated goal.
2) Yes, in some cases, like in college student admissions, it is allowed to take race into account to a limited degree. Overt quotas are not allowed. Thus colleges, corporations, and various other US institutions strive instead to hide how any racial discrimination, used to achieve more diversity, takes place. For example, some Ivy League schools have tried really hard to hide how they discriminate against Asians.
Biden wants to appoint judges who are 1) relatively young; and 2) relatively liberal (just as a Republican president wants to appoint judges who are relatively young and relatively conservative).
Hence, the relevant metric is not the pct of all lawyers who white males, but rather the pct of relatuvely young and liberal lawyers who are white males. Nowhere near 60 pct, I would wager.
Their beliefs are to discriminate against white men?
And yet minorities are allegedly abandoning him. Seems like a paradox in the Dem coalition... the more progressive you are the less black people will vote for you for some reason.
Yes and Arab Americans are going to stay home because Palestine. Talk about cutting off your nose despite your face
It's "to spite"
It's only minority *men* who are moving towards Trump. Hard-core patriarchy does appeal to certain men, even among minorities.
'allegedly'. I'll see how things turn out come November.
6% of Blacks voted for Trump in 2016.
8% of Blacks voted for Trump in 2020.
That, by any measure, is utterly dismal.
But really not a surprise for a bigot who barred Blacks from renting his rich daddy’s apartments and demanded that innocent Black youths be executed for crimes they didn’t commit.
And hey—Trump was willing to defund the military to preserve the names of white supremacist traitors on our military bases.
Whatta guy.
And just as important a large number of these judges were civil rights attorneys, defense lawyers, public defenders, etc. The number of corporate lawyers and prosecutors is WAY down.
Yah, I've always thought that a few years in a public defenders office should be a requirement for the judiciary.
And I follow a rule in elections: NEVER vote for people who used to be prosecutors. (I broke that rule to vote for Kamala Harris.)
Good.
Another "tradition" worth breaking is the virtual lock that Harvard and Yale have as acceptable law schools for SCOTUS justices (Barrett, the lone exception, went to Notre Dame). Break up the club and expand the field.
This must be a very discouraging time to be a white democratic male hoping to be appointed as a judge.
And I wonder if conservative non-white want-to-be judges are liking the current environment as well, in that I suspect that as few of them as the GOP is appointing, it still might be higher as a proportion of the minority conservative plausible candidate pool.
Fortunately for the white lawyers "federal judge" is a fairly small fraction of total judges. Want-to-be judges may have to settle for a state appointment.
indeed. There are fewer than 900 federal judges for the entire nation, meaning that <0.07% of lawyers are federal judges, and <0.003% of the population writ large are federal judges. It's basically nobody, which means anybody wringing their hands about how a discouraging this situation must be for a white male judicial hopeful has their head up their ass.
Not least because the federal judiciary is at present supermajority male and supermajority white.
It’s not discouraging at all. Contrary to what you might think, many white male lawyers are not frat bros and welcome a judiciary that reflects America.
And since judges get paid a fraction of what trial lawyers are paid, it’s astonishing that these low-paid jobs weren’t shoved off onto women and minorities decades ago.
Not discouraging at all? If you are a white liberal male lawyer who wants to become a federal judge (and many do), of course information like this is going to bother the shit out of you.
And nice how you split all liberal male lawyers with judicial aspirations into frat bros (presumably meant pejoratively) and folks who would be willing to sacrifice their ambitions for greater social equity. Nothing in between is possible?
Reminds me of a story I heard about an architecture firm. After many years they finally made a woman partner in the firm. That year all the other female architects got much bigger raises than their male colleagues. It wasn't because the board had suddenly become biased against men. It merely started to erase the former bias against women.
This statement, or so it seems to me, appears to place Kevin firmly with the Leftist identitarians:
"Biden is appointing non-white judges at more than twice the rate of Barack Obama and three times the rate of Bill Clinton ... And 63% of Biden's judges have been women ... Put it together, and only 13% of Biden's judges have been white men ... It's easy to talk the talk, but Biden has walked the walk."
The clear assumption here is that the huge number of women and minority groups appointed by Biden is a good thing. And I'm sure an argument can be made to support that thesis. But Kevin doesn't present any such argument.
And that seems to indicate a "diversity for diversity's sake" mindset. Do you feel that Biden's appointments are good because they are correcting historic wrongs? Do you believe that women are in fact superior to men? What is the actual rationale behind this blog post?
Speaking for myself, I would like to see as fair an appointment process as possible. I believe in equal opportunity regardless of anyone's immutable traits. Yet Biden's appointments, as described here by Kevin, do not in fact sound fair.
In fact, this sounds very hard to justify for a full four year term: "only 13% of Biden's judges have been white men." To me, this sounds obviously biased against white men. I suspect (as Kevin indicates) that many other people would feel the same way. And I'm more than a bit at a loss why Kevin simply dismisses such an obvious perspective as, apparently, beneath consideration.
And here's the problem: that's a deeply unpopular ideology.
Most people, like me, appreciate a fair process based on as accurate an assessment of merit as possible. There is no end of polling to confirm this issue: Americans love merit.
Americans will also put up with a certain amount of diversity for the sake of diversity. But, based on the stats provided by Kevin, Biden has clearly overdone it. And Biden is quite possibly putting his reelection, the country, and maybe even the fate of the world in jeopardy with his embrace of identitarianism, DEI, "antiracism," or whatever you want to call the modern Left's identity-obsessed ideology.
The fact is, there is a vast pool of candidates qualified for the federal judiciary. Just as there are tens of thousands of students qualified for the freshman class at Harvard.
You can’t really “rank” them—it would be easy to choose an entire class of gay Black lacrosse players, all of whom are eminently qualified.
And since, for three centuries, only white men were actually the beneficiaries of the affirmative action quotas then in place, it’s very, very unlikely that the quality of the average federal judge (or Harvard freshman) will suffer if the scales are tipped a bit to make up for the prior three centuries.
+1 for a good response to Leo's hackery, but -1 for engaging him at all.
@KKseattle:
"And since, for three centuries, only white men were actually the beneficiaries of the affirmative action quotas then in place, it’s very, very unlikely that the quality of the average federal judge (or Harvard freshman) will suffer if the scales are tipped a bit to make up for the prior three centuries."
I suspect, though he never spells it out, that this perspective is more or less the guiding principle of Kevin's post.
Nevertheless, I would say that there are quite a few potential issues with it.
I have already mentioned an obvious problem: basing appointments on identity is deeply unpopular. And there is an election to win. So this issue strikes me as an area where Biden's political acumen has clearly, perhaps even indisputably, failed him. He has left himself wide open for deeply damaging and effective attacks on this topic. And, from a purely political perspective, I would say he has let us down by doing so. The slower approach adopted by Clinton and Obama (and arguably ridiculed in Kevin's post) was better politics. And politics matters (whether anyone likes it or not). Winning elections matters.
Also, the notion that "the scales" must be "tipped a bit" is clearly open to debate. First of all, the entire point of my post above is that Biden has erred, and politically weakened himself, by tipping the scales quite a lot more than just "a bit." Again, limiting the appointment of white males to just 13% (over the course of a 4 year Presidential term) is indefensible outside a very tiny slice of our sociopolitical spectrum.
But then there's the broader argument of how to best achieve justice. Is it by pursuing policies that help to create equal opportunity for all (which I unequivocally endorse) or by dictating outcomes to ostensibly achieve an unavoidably narrow view of fairness? The modern Far Left obviously prefers the latter; but, here's the problem: that's one of the main reasons why the modern far Left is so unpopular.
You have to show that you deeply support the Party's most unpopular, hypocritical positions in order to secure your status as a Blue Tribe-approved pundit. Mr Drum knocks out a lot of posts to keep his readers coming back every day and he's not going to screw it up by talking sense on Biden's pandering.
As tiresomely offensive as ever. Never change Leo, never change.
FFS.
@cmayo:
The WP recently published a (very long overdue) editorial condemning the mandatory requirement for potential teachers to submit so-called "diversity statements" to their potential employers.
And this is the WP we're talking about. Not Fox News. But it gets better. Here is the most liked comment on that editorial:
"DEI is absolutely toxic. 'Diversity' means treating individuals as a representation of their group identity ... In practice, it means putting identity above merit, rewarding and punishing individuals based on their ancestry and, increasingly, their political ideology ...
'Equity' is a political ideology that is distinct from, and contradictory to, 'equality' ...
'Inclusion' is a code word for a distinct, left-wing orthodoxy and is used to suppress disfavored groups and opinions"
All of this is not only true; it is also, and has always been, obvious. And, again, all of this is now (finally) coming from the WP and its readership. That crowd is not typically Conservative, Republican, or MAGA. They're typically somewhere on the Left. And yet even they are sick to death of the incredibly toxic identitarian Leftists.
But that is the identitarianism that Biden has embraced (and which Kevin celebrates) by limiting his judicial appointments among white men to just 13%. It's easily the dumbest, most reckless, and most self-destructive thing he's done during his presidency. Most voters favor fairness and common sense; not racial quotas.
So Biden has put us all at grave risk in order to pander to a tiny faction of identity-obsessed ideological extremists. And I expected a hell of a lot better than that when I voted for for him in 2020. Shame on him.
"All of this is not only true.."
in reality, none of that is true. Those are all lies. Since your entire argument is based on these distorted and untrue definitions, we now know that we can safely ignore your arguments. Thank you for posting and clarifying that for us!
Intriguing.
I'm going to repsond in general to the tone of the arguments in this thread, rather than to any one individual.
The framing of Affirmative Action as biased against Whites is faulty in the first place. If properly applied, as it is in my opnion in this case, what one does when hiring is play the diversity card last: among equally-qualified candidates, choose the candidate that makes the cohort less monochrime. If a candidate clearly stands out as the best candidate, and happens to be White and male, hire him. Otherwise, consider the make-up of your workforce, and choose a candidate that makes it more diverse.
For years, it's been the other way. Minority or woman candidates had to be the one that stood clear of the field or they could not be hired. What Biden is doing is the same thing, but choosing from the other side of the divide.
Trump actually appointed judges rated unqualified by the ABA to pick from his preferred side of the divide. Biden has never done this.
If a large private sector company, over a three and a half year period, had new hires consisting only of 13% white men, they'd probably have a lawsuit on their hands. Why in the world would you think this would be something for Biden to brag about?
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