Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz has said that President Joe Biden’s promise to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer with a Black woman is “offensive” and an “insult to Black women”.
“The fact that he’s willing to make a promise at the outset, that it must be a Black woman, I got to say, that’s offensive,” Mr Cruz said on his podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz. “Black women are, what, six per cent of the US population? He’s saying to 94 per cent of Americans, ‘I don’t give a damn about you’.”
“It’s actually an insult to Black women – if he came and he said ‘I’m going to put the best jurist on the court’ and he looked at a number of people and he ended up nominating a Black woman – he could credibly say ‘I’m nominating the person who’s most qualified’,” Mr Cruz added.
“He’s not even pretending to say that, he’s saying ‘if you’re a white guy – tough luck, if you’re a white woman – tough luck, if you’re [Attorney General and 2016 Supreme Court nominee] Merrick Garland – how much does it suck to be Merrick Garland?” Mr Cruz pondered.
“He literally has to sit there and be told at the outset he is ineligible, because sorry – wrong skin pigment and wrong y chromosome,” Mr Cruz added. “It’s an example [of] how Democrats, and in particular the far left – everything is race, they will discriminate based on race, they will pigeonhole you, they don’t care about the ... individual.”
Twitter users were quick to blast Mr Cruz for his comments, with one account holder asking, “when’s the last time Ted Cruz asked a black woman her opinion on anything?”
“Please don’t argue with these people and just call them racists. Won’t fix them but it will save a lot of time,” another social media user said. “How do you say ‘I want to criticize this political decision’, and somehow arrive at the worst possible way to go about it?” a third tweeted.
While pundits and politicians on the right criticised Mr Biden’s decision to announce ahead of time that his nominee would be a Black woman, it’s not a new phenomenon for presidents, Republicans included, to decide the gender of a new justice ahead of time.
“It will be a woman, a very talented, very brilliant woman,” then-President Donald Trump said at a rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina in September 2020 following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, according to The Washington Post. “I haven’t chosen yet, but we have numerous women on the list.”
Mr Trump then nominated Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
President Ronald Reagan, then the Republican nominee, pledged late in the 1980 campaign to nominate a woman if given the chance. He said he would select “the most qualified woman I can possibly find”.
“It is time for a woman to sit among the highest jurists,” he added.
When Justice Thurgood Marshall retired during the presidency of George HW Bush, the commander in chief said his selection would not depend on a “quota”, but administration staffers revealed at the time that his search for a nominee almost only included women and minority jurists, The Post reported.
Justice Clarence Thomas, a Black conservative, was later nominated to the court.
