Another win in Joe Biden’s column
In just over two months, we’ve seen a night and day difference in the leadership between President Biden and the former guy he succeeded. There will always be the detractors who will say that both sides are the same, largely because the new administration isn’t acting fast enough on their pet goals, whatever they happen to be, but on Tuesday, President Biden made it more apparent than ever that this administration is a significant improvement over Donald Trump’s – and it could be shaping America for the better decades after Joe Biden is no longer in office.
On Tuesday, the president revealed the first slate of his judicial picks – a racially diverse and for the first time in history, predominantly made up of women – significantly different than the mostly white and male picks that were rammed through during the Trump administration with the blessing of McConnell’s Senate.
Biden already promised a cabinet “that looks like America,” but now he’s trying to do the same with the judicial system, notably with three Black women appointed to federal courts of appeals. The federal courts of appeals has long been considered a pathway to the Supreme Court. Most prominent on the list is U.S. District Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has been named to fill Attorney General Merrick Garland’s former seat. This has led many to speculate that she may soon replace Justice Breyer, as Biden pledged during his campaign to nominate a Black woman to SCOTUS in the event of a vacancy, but what’s more pertinent is the groundwork being laid right now.
How a court more moderate than the last two decades or so interprets the law can bring us to a much better place than we were before – and as of the present, it’s something that can only happen if Democrats have the White House and both houses of Congress – even if the margins are slight in both. It’s also some serious progress that we need to build upon come the 2022 midterms.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making