No Diversity for WASPs
“A chorus of black commentators and civic leaders has begun expressing frustration over (Elena) Kagan’s hiring record as Harvard dean. From 2003 to 2009, 29 faculty members were hired: 28 were white and one was Asian American.”
CNN pundit Roland Martin slammed “Kagan’s record on diversity as one that a ‘white Republican U.S. president’ would be criticized for.”
This is an excerpt from the Washington Post about the rising anger in a black community, which voted 24-1 for Obama, that one of their own was once again passed over for the Supreme Court.
Not since Thurgood Marshall, 43 years ago, has a Democratic president chosen an African-American. The lone sitting black justice is Clarence Thomas, nominated by George H. W. Bush. And Thomas was made to run a gauntlet by Senate liberals.
Indeed, of the last seven justices nominated by Democrats JFK, LBJ, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, one was black, Marshall; one was Puerto Rican, Sonia Sotomayor. The other five were Jews: Arthur Goldberg, Abe Fortas, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.
If Kagan is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats.
Is this the Democrats’ idea of diversity?
But while leaders in the black community may be upset, the folks who look more like the real targets of liberal bias are white Protestants and Catholics, who still constitute well over half of the U.S. population.
Not in living memory has a Democratic president nominated an Irish, Italian or Polish Catholic, though these ethnic communities once gave the party its greatest victories in the cities and states of the North.
What happened to the party of the Daleys, Rizzos and Rostenkowskis?
And not in nearly half a century has a Democratic president nominated a white Protestant or white Catholic man or woman.
The last was Byron “Whizzer” White, the all-American running back from the University of Colorado, nominated by his friend Jack Kennedy. White cast one of the only two votes against Roe v Wade.
What of the record of Republican presidents?
Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford made seven nominations. All were white Protestant males: Warren Burger, Clement Haynsworth, Harrold Carswell, Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, William Rehnquist and John Paul Stevens.
The diversity Nixon sought was first to put a Southerner on the court. He succeeded in his third try, with Powell. And he sought to put the first woman on the court, but pulled back from nominating Judge Mildred Lillie of California when the American Bar Associated rated her unqualified.
With Ronald Reagan and Bush I came Republican diversity.
Reagan’s first choice was Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman ever nominated. His second was Antonin Scalia, the first Italian-American. When his third nominee, Robert Bork, a Protestant, was rejected, Reagan chose Bork’s Jewish colleague on the U.S. Appellate Court for the District of Columbia, Douglas H. Ginsburg. When Douglas Ginsburg was pulled because of a marijuana incident in college, Reagan chose the Irish Catholic Anthony Kennedy.
George H. W. Bush picked David Souter, a Protestant from New Hampshire, and Clarence Thomas, the second African-American to sit. George W. Bush chose John Roberts, a Catholic; Harriet Miers, the first Evangelical Christian of our era; and Sam Alito, the second Italian Catholic.
If Kagan is confirmed, the Court will consist of three Jews and six Catholics (who represent not quite a fourth of the country), but not a single Protestant, though Protestants remain half the nation and our founding faith.
If Kagan is confirmed, three of the four justices nominated by Democratic presidents will be from New York City: Kagan from the Upper West Side, Sotomayor from the Bronx, Ruth Bader Ginsburg from Brooklyn. Breyer is from San Francisco.
What kind of diversity is this — either in geography or life experience?
While Sotomayor went to Yale Law School, the other three liberals went to Harvard, though Ruth Bader Ginsburg graduated from Columbia. Seems a fairly narrow range for a party that once claimed to be America’s party.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg tied for first in her class at Columbia, but neither Obama nominee is academically distinguished. Sotomayor called herself an “affirmative action baby” who, at Princeton, was urged to read children’s books in the summer to improve her reading and writing skills. Kagan never served as a judge, never litigated a case before being named solicitor general, never wrote a book or anything else anyone has turned up that manifests real legal scholarship.
From her Princeton thesis on the sad demise of 20th-century socialism, to her tears at the defeat of the radical liberal Senate candidate Elizabeth Holtzman in 1980, to her hostility to the U.S. military on the Harvard campus while dean of the law school, Kagan has revealed herself to be one more Ivy League leftist anxious to use a lifetime seat on the court, winning the plaudits of her peers by imposing her ideology on a nation that has never voted for it.
Conservatives will not soon get another opportunity like this to take down Ivy League pretensions to represent and rule America.
Patrick J. Buchanan is founding editor of The American Conservative and author, most recently, of Churchill, Hitler, and the “Unnecessary War”.
COPYRIGHT 2010 CREATORS.COM
As an Evangelical Protestant, I wish to point out that the blame for our under-representation lies with primarily with us.
Protestants parents too frequently send their children to (bad) public schools, and even when they do support schools of their own, they don’t prioritize Latin.
Your commentary about diversity is entertaining, but since Eisenhower’s election, Republicans have appointed 17 of 24 Justices. Of the present Supreme Court, Republicans have appointed 6 of 9 Justices.
Would you be more comfortable if we rolled back the clock to the days of Protestant-dominated Supreme Courts?
You don’t think that Elena Kagan is academically distinguished? She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, was a Supervisory Editor of the Harvard Law Review, clerked for the Supreme Court, published articles, became a tenured professor… that stacks up well as compared to the academic records of the most distinguished appointees of either Bush – she’s quite comparable, in fact, to Roberts (but with greater academic credentials). Heck, if you compare credentials she stacks up well when compared to any of Reagan’s appointees, including Scalia.
Pat makes a fair point. Why should there be such a high concentration of supreme court justices that happen to share a particular minority ethno-religious background? If there were even six qualified white protestants on the supreme court the rhetoric from the left would be calls for more diversity on the court even then. Or is diversity a one-way street?
Identity politics are so frustratingly stupid.
Being a graduate from an Ivy League school is not a negative. The negative is that the Supreme Court is losing Educational Diversity amongst its members. A very simple example could be vanilla ice cream. Everyone likes vanilla ice cream. The problem arises when you limit your diet exclusively to vanilla ice cream. You get lots of calcium, but you lose out on all of the other needed vitamins and minerals to live a healthy productive life. The same can be said about losing the diversity of knowledge and diverse perspectives that people from other institutions can provide. The majority of the Supreme Court Judges should not be Ivy League graduates.
I am of the opinion that the Supreme Court is setting itself up for challenge, as to whether or not 1) their opinions are in fact biased due to their common Ivy League education, and 2) they are engaging in discrimination, by limiting the Court to Ivy League Graduates.
The following applies to Kagan, just as it did to Sotomajor.
This editorial was created by 160 Associated Press readers under a Creative Commons Share-Alike Attribution License 3.0 using MixedInk’s collaborative writing tool. For more about how it was created, see here. It can be republished only if accompanied by this note.
Obamas Appointment of Sotomayor Fails to Offer Educational Diversity to Court.
Sotomayor does not offer true diversity to our Supreme Court. The potential power of Sotomayor’s diversity as a Latina Woman, from a disadvantaged background, loses its strength because her Yale Law degree does not offer educational diversity to the current mix of sitting Judges. Once she walked through the Gates of Princeton and then Yale Law School she became educated by the same Professors that have educated the majority of our current Supreme Court Justices, and our Presidents.
Diversity in education is extremely important. We need to look for diversity in our ideas, and if our leaders are from the same educational background, they lose the original power of their ethnic and gender diversity. The ethnic and gender diversity many of our current leaders possess no longer brings a plethora of new ideas, only the same perspective they learned from their common Ivy League education. One example of the common education problem is that Yale has been heavily influenced by a former lecturer at Yale, Judge Frank, who developed the philosophy of Legal Realism. Frank argued that Judges should not only look at the original intent of the Constitution, but they should also bring in outside influences, including their own experiences in order to determine the law. This negative interpretation has influenced both Conservatives and Liberals graduating from Yale. It has been said that Legal Realism has infested Yale Law School and turned lawyers into political activists.
A generation of appointees with either a Harvard or Yale background, has the potential to distort the proper interpretation of our Constitution. America needs to decentralize the power structure away from the Ivy League educated individual and gain from the knowledgeable and diverse perspectives that people from other institutions can provide. We should appoint Supreme Court Justices educated from amongst a wider group of Americas Universities.
Harvard -
Chief Justice John Roberts
Anthony Kennedy
Antonin Scalia
Stephen Breyer
Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Harvard, Columbia)
Yale
Samuel Alito – Yale JD 1975
David Souter
Clarence Thomas – Yale JD 1974
Sonia Sotomayor – Yale JD 1979
Northwestern Law School.
Justice John Paul Stevens
The Presidents we have elected for the last twenty years, have themselves been Harvard or Yale educated. This has the potential to create an even more closed minded interpretation of our laws.
Yale – Bush Sr. – 4 years
Yale Law – Clinton – 8 years
Yale – Bush, Jr. – 8 Years
Harvard Law – Obama – 4 – 8 years
When we consider that our Nation has potentially twenty – eight years of Presidential influence from these two Universities, as Americans, we should look long and hard at the influence Yale and Harvard have exerted on our nation’s policies. Barack Obama promised America Change, but he has continued the same discriminatory policy by appointing a Yale graduate over many qualified candidates that graduated from other top Colleges and Universities in America.
Yes, there is always a problem when all the different groups are keeping ‘score’. Many companies do this as well in order to meet certain ethnic hiring quotas. The big danger here of course is that often racial backgrounds become more important than actual pure qualifications and organizations whether corporate or government, do not get the best people for the right jobs.
Justice Scalia is from NY City too, Queens to be precise.
[...] The American Conservative: No Diversity for WASPs Patrick J. Buchanan – 5/13/2010 [...]
Thank you for finally pointing out the obvious; the left’s covert destruction of all things WASP. WASPS do sit at the back of the bus now; they are passed over for minorites in hiring, grad school acceptance (especially white males in the medical profession), and obviously in government. So much for winning because you deserve to, because you earned it. Regarding Kagan, her main experiences in life appear to be her obsequious
kissing of Obambi and her hostility towards all things military. She has carefully voted present at each juncture she could to hide any more of her radical tendencies. Perhaps her sexuality will soothe the Left”s demise. Remember November.
Buchanan: “If Kagan is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats.”
Roland Martin and the African American community have every right to be angry with the disproportionately Jewish limousine liberal Democratic Party elite.
In the 111th Congress, there are a total of 257 Democrats in the House. Thirty-one of them are Jewish (all Congressional Jews are Democrats except for Eric Cantor, the only Jewish Republican). That’s nearly 12%. (Again, Jews comprise less than 2% of the country).
And the ratio is even more out of balance in the Senate, where there are a total of 57 Democrats, plus two “Independents” that caucus with the Democrats. Of that total of 59 Senators, 13 are Jewish — an astounding 22%.
How many black U.S. Senators are there? Only one: Roland Burris, the only black in the entire Senate, even though African-Americans comprise over 12% of the country (and a lot higher percentage than that of loyal Democratic Party voters).
Put all of that together with wars in the Middle East that the Democrats have rubber stamped and are even escalating — wars that disproportionately rely upon lower middle class and underclass U.S. soldiers, and that Walt and Mearsheimer have strongly argued are largely for the Jewish state of Israel, and were in part instigated by the Israel lobby; add in the Democrat Party support for Wall Street bailouts that threw billions of dollars at firms like Goldman Sachs; and suddenly, the Democrats no longer look like the party of the underdog, the blue collar Joe or the pink collar Jane, but rather the party owned and operated by a wealthy cosmopolitan elite FOR a wealthy cosmopolitan elite.
In fact, excluding the Ron Paulites, both parties are literally at war with the vast majority of the American people at the behest of the corrupt political class and its State-enriched cronies. The evidence at this point is overwhelming.
The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination, not only in America, but in the world. Yet it has produced exactly as many Supreme Court Justices as the Quakers or the Huguenots, namely one each. As much to do with the “Southern” as to do with the “Baptist”? Undoubtedly. But in the clamor for a Protestant, and with a President who has both a record for unpredictability and a second coalition to build, this felt like white Evangelicalism’s year.
Yet it was not to be. The academic advance of the white Evangelical community, though striking, is still not quite there yet. There have long been been so many Jewish lawyers that the question is not so much that Kagan will be the third on the present Court, as that she will be only the seventh ever. The law also became a well-traveled route uptown for several Catholic ethnic groups. Among the white Evangelicals, that process is now well underway.
Not only has Kagan never sat as a judge, but her published work is silent on a great many issues. She is assumed to be pro-abortion, but no one really knows. She vigorously opposed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, but that is no longer a live issue. She failed to speak out against the Bush Administration’s constitutional outrages: surveillance, detention, rendition. But that might stand her in good stead when it comes to confirmation. Sad, but true.
And she told her hearing for Solicitor General that there was no constitutional right to same-sex “marriage”, making her nomination the end of the impending challenge to Proposition 8.
@ David Lindsay: There was a Huguenot justice? That’s awesome: who was it?
I’m rather surprised anyone who has followed politics since FDR would think the Democratic Party would appoint “WASPs”. The “WASPs” have literally never been in the Democratic Party fold. (Technically speaking, southern Scots-Irish Protestants aren’t “WASPs”, and anyway they left the national Democratic Party 40 years ago, latest.)
Gabriel Duvall, who sat from 1811 to 1835.
Pat is correct.
Editor Pruden of the Washingtion Times has an article today which reveals Kagan’s sympathy for restrictions on speech, which government deems hateful. Constitutionally, that is intolerable.
Especially in an era when people are just now asking very serious questions based upon evidence, who did 9/11?
Who killed JFK?
What is the flavor of organized crime that is looting the nation?
Who controls Congress and media?
Who controls Federal Reserve?
Who benefits from our wars?
Who believes in telling lies to the masses and truth to the elite?
Who believes in, or is most sympathetic to, economic power over truth and justice?
Who controls all thought and covers up the truthful answers to the above?
The Supreme Court should reflect the composition of the country!!!
Why is Pat so damn concerned about WASPs? He’s Irish Catholic, like myself. And, let’s not forget that the “AS” in “WASP” stands for “Anglo-Saxon,” i.e., English, whose people have been oppressing the Irish for damn near a thousand years!
Pat, stop trying to curry favor with people whose ancestors OWNED OUR FOREBEARS!
Adam Rurik, do you know anything at all about the history of Ireland? Evidently not.
Would you expect that a wasp liberal supreme court justice would vote any differently than a jewish one? I don’t think so. Or, for that matter, would you expect Sotomayor, who is Catholic, would vote any differently than Kagan might be expected to vote on most issues. I don’t think so. To me then, the only real issue is whether one is in favor of a liberal or a conservative justice. Not all jews are liberal of course, just as not all wasps are conservative, and there are plenty of wasps who are further to the left of Kagan. To attack the choice of Kagan on the basis of her religion then is illogical and wrong.
Pat is both right and very wrong here. His point that the left is anti-WASP is quite true. The Democrats have since the 1880s been a collection of those with grievances against the majority. The preacher, who cost Republican James Blaine (himself half-Catholic with a nun for a sister) the election in 1884 with the line that the Democrats were the party of Rum (urban poor, many of whom were alcoholics), Romanism (a derisive term for Catholics) and Rebellion (Southerners), was quite correct if impolitic. The FDR coalition of Southerners, white ethnics (Catholics and Jews), labor, and Northern Blacks was an extension of this. And it has re-invented itself with every generation. The only difference today is that the Scotch Irish (ironically the first group reached out to in this manner) are now lumped in with WASPs.
A majority of Americans are Protestants and it is wrong that no member of the founding population of the US is on the court. The American political tradition was founded by dissenting Protestants. A court without one shows just how far we have gone from out heritage and founding principles in an increasing krytocratic court that thinks it writes the Constitution.
Of course, while Jews certainly are over-represented, but 2/3 of this court is now Catholic. I don’t see the German-Irish Catholic Buchanan complaining about this now or back when President Bush nominated Alito. Buchanan reaffirms himself as a antisemitic hypocrite. But don’t think that the issue of the US Supreme Court being Protestant-less is irrelevant.
Kagan is a communist and Obama would like nothing more than useful idiots to make this a Jewish issue so that the man protecting Iran’s nuclear program from Israel can scream “antisemitism”.
And why is it that although women make up just over 50% of the US population, currently only 22% of the justices are women? Worse, even if Kagan makes it in, they’ll still only make up 33% of the court. Is this diversity? Or what? Or maybe all those numbers Pat is throwing around are meaningless.
Even Thurgood Marshall was an Episcopalian.
Pat’s not Irish Catholic. His father was Scots Irish and Protestant, his mother German Catholic. While his religion is Catholic his ethnic allegiance is redneck WASP. This explains a lot. You could say about him what Evelyn Waugh said about himself: WERE HE NOT CATHOLIC HE WOULD BE A LOT WORSE!
Given that white male Protestants wrote the Constitution, and what we have come to think of as traditionally “American” is largely a function of the Protestant vision of inclusiveness, one would think Protestants would get a bit more respect in terms of consideration for the S.C., particularly given that its primary job is to interpret the Constitution.
Will a Protestant and a Jew interpret the Constitution differently based on background faith? IMO, absolutely, because the post-tribalism that characterizes America’s founding documents (“All men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…”) took a leap of faith that started from a Protestant jumping point.
Thus, I think Jews are far more likely to be sympathetic to the kind of identity-politics tribalism that the Left panders to which IMO is completely out of alignment with what it means to be “American.”
That said, so is Stevens, so perhaps liberal Protestants have leapt so far from their roots that they’ve completely lost sight of the religion that they were supposed to be building from. No wonder they’ve drifted now for so long in a kind of ether completely un-tethered from any kind of firm principles — and today are finally crashing on the rocks below.
The Catholics seem more grounded — at least the non-liberal ones.
Actually, John Jay, the first Chief Justice, was also of Huguenot descent.
His son, John Jay Jr, founded the Huguenot Society of America.
David Lindsay, why don’t you EDUCATE me, setanta?
This Diversity-Multiculti doctrine is no longer from the fringe, it’s the de facto official ideology of the ruling elites. It began about the time of the Duke Power case and has become progressively more entrenched since then. But when it comes to the Ivy League (and at least one ethnic group) unprincipled exceptions are made. One can’t help but think that it’s all about Lenin’s “Who? Whom? “
Chris Moore…
Are you Roman Catholic or Protestant?
What do you think of all the Roman Catholics on the Supreme Court?
What do you think of Cardinal Roger Mahoney being the pied piper of the illegal Mexican immigration into our once Protestant nation?
I find it funny to read comments from Papists…who love that the Church is on the high road…and has hoards of fellow Papists from South of the Border…sneaking into this nation…thousands every day as we speak…with Roger Mahoney luring them into his pews…
They love to point the finger at Jews…but…low and behold…the Papists will dominate this country…as they have in every nation in the Western Hemisphere.
Beware of the party of Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.
Another thing, Lindsay, you are the WORST writer on TAC’s staff! Hell, half your posts are just three sentences!
[...] Maybe so. Maybe Western secularists want to tempt young Muslim women into entering swimsuit competitions, and violate their religion’s teaching about modesty in dress. That is more plausible than thinking there is widespread prejudice and discrimination against white Protestants. [...]
Protestants make up over 50% of America and now 0% of the Supreme Court. This is a sad watershed moment.
The court is now locked in a battle between four liberals (three Jews and a wise Latina Roman Catholic) and five conservative Roman Catholics. Liberal Protestants are close cousins of the liberal wing of the SCOTUS. Their god is big government.
The god of the five conservative Roman Catholics is tradition. God now seems pleased to turn the country over to an elite who unanimously sneer at sola scriptura. The American experiment is now officially over. We have become Europe, both the liberal Godless and neomedievalist versions. The American Revolution failed.
Sorry…but most of the founding fathers…in fact…all of the founding fathers…were Protestant…except for Carroll of Maryland…who was about as English as King George III…
Let’s have justices who are like John Marshall and Oliver Wendell Holmes…and not have a liberal beauty contest that appeals to ethnic and religious groups…
I believe as americans we should examine our on constitution and declaration of Independence, this will give all americans a better understanding on how this country was founded the beliefs that we believe in and the direction we must take to uphold the befiefs of our founding fathers or we must prepare to change.
yes, the liberal idea of diversity is definately a one way street. It takes no “brain” to see it! What hypocrites they are.
The new crop of lower middle class-derived American ‘elites’ have rather imposing chips on their shoulders. That they actively discriminate against WASPS is no secret to any highly credentialed WASP that has ever competed with a less qualified ‘minority’ for a position at an elite institution. The lower middle class ‘elite’ tasked with hiring will favor the less qualified ‘minority’ every time.
As one of the sorely discriminated against WASP’s, I must say I find the absolute intellectual poverty of this thread breathtaking. The South won the Civil War in 1980, and now we have a low tax, low service, and low wage society. Money has run up hill for forty years, and I should be concerned about the ethnocentric and religious make up of the Supreme Court?? To paraphrase Edward Gibbon, behind every government you will find a small financially powerful elite. Class warfare is being made on working Americans, and the racially divisive politics of white grievance is in full flower. The conservatism of Tom Dewey is dead. Whine away if you will, there will be no bright morning in America ever again. Conservatism today is nothing than an empty illusion. Of course we could always revert to the sensible solution of Sulla the dictator and proscribe the three or four hundred richest people in the Country. That would balance the budget in a hurry.