Since 1790, when the Supreme Court was to convene (delayed due to absent justices) we have nearly always limited our Supreme Court nominees to white, Anglo Saxon Protestant males. Biden is criticized because he has “limited” his search to African American women. While these criticisms have some merit, they seem discriminatory to me.

Do we really need a nominee pool of millions to find a qualified nominee? Note that in recent years, the nominee pool sometimes had been limited to white male Harvard graduates. Harvard is an extraordinary institution, but it has its own history of giving preference to white males, who are Harvard graduate descendants, or whose family has donated oodles of money to Harvard.

As Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell recently stated, President Biden is not the first president of either major party who has limited his nominee pool. Biden recognizes the long standing injustice in a single arena, albeit a critically important one. His nomination process is one step forward in a long haul to addressing hundreds of years of gross inequities in how we treat anyone who is not a white, male Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

Jo Ann Myers
Waldoboro

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