Ezra Klein Calls Bulls**t on Accusations that Obama Unfairly Favors Women for the High Court
Big ups to our colleague (for now, anyway) Ezra Klein, whose Washington Post column today thrashes the argument that Obama shouldn’t nominate two women in a row to the Supreme Court. Since women make up half the population, the odds of two women being seated to the high court in a row are a solid 25%. The odds that 34 male justices would be seated even after women got the vote? 0.000000000058, he calculates. In his words, “Yipes.”
Americans like to believe that discrimination is in our past and so nothing has to be done to rectify it in the present … But more subtly invidious is the simple fact that people are so unused to seeing women appointed to the court that it’s somehow a scandal to see two of them named in a row. Two women and we’re talking about systematic discrimination. And that reaction means that even though the coin says there’s an even chance that Obama’s next pick will be a woman also, there’s probably not an even chance of it, as he’ll have to prove that he’s not favoring women. After all, it’s one thing to appoint 101 men in a row. But three women? Why, that’d be un-American!
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. Preach.
