President Joe Biden’s plan to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court will mean extra scrutiny for the way politicians and Washington insiders talk about a confirmation fight — and the first weeks underscored how it could get treacherous.
Georgetown University Law Center put a senior lecturer on administrative leave for some tweets about the upcoming vacancy that compared a male judge to a “lesser black woman.” An editor at Politico apologized on Twitter and clarified wording she had added to a guest editorial “to remove an implication that Breyer’s successor would lack some of his strengths.”
A legal writing guru published online a comparison of the opinions written by two leading contenders for the pick, then took it down minutes after a right-wing operative cited it to write that one of the judges wrote opinions that struck him as “in need of a thorough edit.”
