During his campaign for the presidency in 2020, Joseph Biden promised to nominate the first Black woman to the United States Supreme Court. With the nomination to the court of Ketanji Brown Jackson, this pledge has been fulfilled.
Numerous Republican critics allege that as race and gender were specified criteria in this choice, the candidacy of Jackson is thereby unworthy and illegitimate.
But these critics fail to acknowledge that without exception all 95 justices who served on the court from its creation in 1789 until 1967 were white men. Plainly, furthermore, these justices were nominated in part precisely because they were white men.
Were their tenures on the Court thereby illegitimate?
Joseph Tipler
Centralia
