Torture enthusiast pees himself with identity politics

Marc “Waterboard All The Brutes” Thiessen, for some reason, still has a no-think sinecure with the Washington Post, and he believes he has discovered a “gotcha”:

President Biden wants credit for nominating the first Black woman to the Supreme Court. But here is the shameful irony: As a senator, Biden warned President George W. Bush that if he nominated the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court, he would filibuster and kill her nomination.

This isn’t even Alanis-level irony and there’s certainly no shame involved, but carry on:

The story begins in 2003, when Bush nominated Judge Janice Rogers Brown to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The D.C. Circuit is considered the country’s second-most important court, and has produced more Supreme Court justices than any other federal court. Brown was immediately hailed as a potential Supreme Court nominee. She was highly qualified, having served for seven years as an associate justice of the California Supreme Court — the first Black woman to do so. She was the daughter and granddaughter of sharecroppers, and grew up in rural Alabama during the dark days of segregation, when her family refused to enter restaurants or theaters with separate entrances for Black customers. She rose from poverty and put herself through college and UCLA law school as a working single mother. She was a self-made African American legal star. But she was an outspoken conservative — so Biden set out to destroy her.

1)Being rejected for a lifetime appointment as an Article III judge isn’t being “destroyed,” 2)Biden, like most Democrats, opposed Brown because she’s a massive kook who thinks the Constitution enacted Ms. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. But, yes, thanks for establishing that it’s only Republicans who believe in what they claim to think “identity politics” is.

Things get even dumber from here:

When Democrats derailed her nomination, Bush renominated her in 2005. Brown was eventually confirmed by a vote of 56 to 43 — after Democrats released her and several other Bush nominees in exchange for Republican agreement not to eliminate the filibuster for judicial nominations. Biden voted a second time against her nomination. He never explained why, if Brown was so radical, Democrats let her through but killed 10 other Bush nominees.

So, the racist Democrat Party let Brown through after all, because they got completely rolled by Republicans by the Gang of 14 deal, agreeing to allow votes on judicial nominations in exchange for an empty promise Republicans never honored? What even is the argument here anymore?

But this is my favorite bit:

The following month, when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her retirement, Brown was on Bush’s shortlist to replace her. She would have been the first Black woman ever nominated to serve as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. But Biden appeared on CBS’s “Face the Nation” to warn that if Bush nominated Brown, she would face a filibuster. “I can assure you that would be a very, very, very difficult fight and she probably would be filibustered,” Biden said. Asked by moderator John Roberts “Wasn’t she just confirmed?,” Biden replied that the Supreme Court is a “totally different ballgame” because “a circuit court judge is bound by stare decisis. They don’t get to make new law.”

What Biden threatened was unprecedented. There has never been a successful filibuster of a nominee for associate justice in the history of the republic. Biden wanted to make a Black woman the first in history to have her nomination killed by filibuster. Bush eventually nominated Samuel A. Alito Jr.

What Thiessen is hoping you won’t know is that the filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee wouldn’t be unprecedented, only Abe Fortas was nominated for Chief Justice which it totally different because [drowns in pool of his own drool.] And since the filibuster of Fortas also killed Homer Thornberry’s nomination to be Associate justice, it’s not even technically accurate in anything but the most misleadingly formal sense. But when the Post hired the guy who cut his teeth lying in defense of torture and the Iraq War, this is what it was asking for.