One can mark the steep decline our country has been on with the advent of Ronald Reagan’s Morning in America presidency. But, like everything with the GOP, the myth-making around how great a president dear ol’ Reagan was has been inflated to the level of rainbow unicorn ridiculous in their imaginations. He was a criminal who should have been impeached and thrown out of office for violating the Boland Amendment.
With the announcement that Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer will finally be hanging up his robe and retiring, the Democratic Party has a chance to nominate a justice that technically cannot be stolen away by Mitch McConnell. President Biden has long made a pledge to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, and there are quite a few well-regarded candidates being written about as a result. Since the last two Supreme Court justices placed on the court by unpopular president Donald Trump were tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum, the right-wing of the country is stretching itself to complain that the potential nomination of a Black woman to the Supreme Court is reverse racism.*
The argument goes that in campaigning on and promoting one’s intentions to put a woman of color on the Supreme Court, President Biden is discriminating against all of those white people willing to do the bidding of the Federalist Society. Of course, many news outlets are pointing out that the pope of the GOP, Ronald Reagan, made a similar promise back when he was doing sketchy shit to win the presidency of the United States. This has forced right-wingers along the entire spectrum of the GOP, from the duplicitous and craven Sen. Susan Collins to the scary fascist Sen. Josh Hawley, to distance themselves from, and set themselves at odds with, their last made-up example of a successful Republican administration.
*The term “reverse racism” is an acknowledgment that the person claiming it is an ignorant racist.
Law professor and author of Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court, Renee Knake Jefferson, told Business Insider that, because Ronald Reagan was such a sexist and racist governor in California, he needed some kind of carrot to dangle over voters in order to compete with President Jimmy Carter’s record of appointing women and people of color to judicial seats. "Reagan had to offer something in order to earn the vote of women who would care very deeply about that stark contrast.” On Oct. 15, 1980, Reagan told a room filled with reporters:
"I am announcing today that one of the first Supreme Court vacancies in my administration will be filled by the most qualified woman I can possibly find, one who meets the high standards I will demand for all court appointments.”
Sen. Susan Collins gave one of her patented wilting flower statements on the prospect of President Biden nominating someone to the Supreme Court, saying “I do not think that the President handled this as well as he could have, by making a pledge during his campaign, so...” She trailed off and then began walking away, at which point the reporter asked Collins to square that Ronald Reagan-sized circle. Sen. Collins brought her A-game—which means she said something truly asinine. “President Reagan said ‘one’ of his Supreme Court Justices would be a woman. You’re skipping over what he exactly said.”
I give you your “moderate” Republican.
Sen. Josh Hawley, who last we saw crying that white American men were so depressed because of cancel culture that they were playing video games and masturbating too much—which, presumably, was why he wouldn’t work to pass an infrastructure bill—was much more direct in his Ronald Reagan hypocrisy.
Ronald Reagan may be “ancient history” for Sen. Hawley. He prefers the pre-history of the 1930s Nazi Party in Germany.
