Former Vice President Joe Biden promised at the Democrat debate on CNN and Univision Sunday night that he would nominate a “black woman” to the U.S. Supreme Court if he were elected president in November.
Asked what he would do to fight for women’s rights, Biden said: “Number one, I committed that if I’m elected president, to have an opportunity to appoint someone to the courts who will be — I will appoint the first black woman to the courts.”
Biden appeared to be referring to the Supreme Court.
He continued: “It’s required that they have representation now. It’s long overdue.”
Biden seemed to be endorsing the idea that the primary qualification for a Supreme Court justice would be race, gender, and the ability to “represent” a demographic section of the population.
That stance reprises what President Barack Obama said to Planned Parenthood in 2007: “[W]e need somebody who’s got the heart — the empathy — to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old–and that’s the criteria by which I’ll be selecting my judges.”
His first appointee was Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who infamously said that a “wise Latina” could reach “a better conclusion” than a white male judge in certain cases, based on “the richness of her experiences” rather than the law.
Biden then added: “Secondly, if I’m elected president, my Cabinet, my administration will look like the country, and I commit that I will, in fact, appoint a woman to be vice president. There are a number of women qualified to be president tomorrow. I would pick a woman to be my vice president.”
His rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), said he would probably do the same.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.