JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — One of Mississippi’s Republican U.S. senators said that if President Joe Biden nominates a Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court, that nominee would be the beneficiary of a “quota.”
Sen. Roger Wicker spoke about the nomination Friday on the Gallo Radio Show, which aims primarily at a conservative audience on the statewide network Supertalk Mississippi.
The host, Paul Gallo, asked Wicker about Biden’s promise to nominate a Black woman to succeed retiring Justice Stephen Breyer. Gallo said Biden should want to say the nominee is the best of any ethnicity or any gender.
“It’s exactly what Biden said he would do in his campaign, so he’s just fulfilling a campaign promise and he told the whole world that’s exactly what he was going to do,” Wicker said of Biden’s plan to nominate a Black woman.
“The irony is that the Supreme Court is, at the very same time, hearing cases about this sort of affirmative racial discrimination while adding someone who is the beneficiary of this sort of quota,” Wicker said. “The majority of the court may be saying, writ large, it’s unconstitutional. We’ll see how that irony works out.”
Wicker declined to explain his remarks Monday in Washington.
“I’ll let that interview stand,” Wicker told reporters.
In the radio interview, Wicker said that with Breyer’s retirement: “We’re going to go from a nice, stately, left-wing liberal to someone who’s probably more in the style of Sonia Sotomayor. The votes will be the same, so it’s a lateral move.”
He said Biden gets to make a Supreme Court nomination partly because of people who vote Republican were uncomfortable voting for President Donald Trump in 2020 “because they had a problem with his demeanor.”
“We’ll have 30 years of a left-wing judge when, you know, we could’ve had at some point, three, another stellar member like the three that we have gotten recently, particularly in Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh,” Wicker said.
He said he does not expect any Republicans to support Biden’s eventual nominee.
“But we will not treat her like the Democrats did Brett Kavanaugh,” Wicker said. “It was one of the most disgraceful, shameful things – and completely untruthful things – that the Democratic judiciary majority has ever, ever done.”
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The Mississippi Free Press produced this story through the MFP Solutions Lab, supported by the Solutions Journalism Network. This series digs into Mississippi’s systemic issues and sheds light on responses to them in other communities. Beyond just reporting on problems, these stories interrogate their causes and inspect potential solutions.
