Tired of ads? Subscribers enjoy a distraction-free reading experience.
Click here to subscribe today or Login.

During the 1980 presidential campaign, when candidate Ronald Reagan vowed to put a woman on the Supreme Court for the first time, it was widely viewed as groundbreaking and courageous. Reagan later appointed Sandra Day O’Connor, who sailed through the Senate without a single “no” vote. Supporters included then-Sen. Joe Biden.

Forty years later, in 2020, President Donald Trump, running for a second term, pledged to nominate a woman to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He later named Amy Coney Barrett.

Yet Republican heads were exploding at President Biden’s recent announcement that he will follow through on his campaign promise to nominate the first Black woman to the court, which they condemn as identity politics. “Offensive,” declared Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., called it “affirmative racial discrimination … adding someone who is the beneficiary of this sort of quota.” Former Trump U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley slammed Biden for using a “race/gender litmus test.”

So — when Reagan, and then Trump, each limited the pool of acceptable candidates to only women, everyone was fine with it. (Democrats objected to Barrett’s specific record, not to Trump’s earlier vow to pick a woman.) But when Biden specifies it’s going to be a Black woman, suddenly Republicans find it “offensive” and “affirmative racial discrimination” and decry the “race/gender litmus test.”

What do you suppose is the difference here? …

Gee, I wonder what it could be? …

I’m just wracking my brains trying to figure it out. …

It would be easy, and accurate, to hold this up as yet another example of the astonishing hypocrisy of today’s GOP. Whether it’s deficit spending, “family values,” law and order, standing up to Russia, or making up the rules as they go along regarding Supreme Court vacancies, Republicans these days change belief systems the way most people change their socks. The “belief” is whatever serves, in the moment, the overriding goal of gaining political power.

But what’s going on here is worse than hypocrisy. We’ve gotten so used to it that most don’t bother to say it anymore, even though Trump and other Republicans increasingly aren’t bothering to hide it: Overt racism has become a primary tool in the GOP’s power project.

Those on the political right who don’t understand America’s racial history (or pretend not to) often respond to that kind of critique by pointing out that the GOP was literally founded on the principle of ending slavery. And that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. And that it was northern Republicans who helped Lyndon Johnson pass civil rights laws over the resistance of southern Democrats.

That narrative is factually correct as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. It stops just before Richard Nixon launched his “Southern strategy” in the late 1960s, which flipped the racial positions of both parties. His goal was to lure Southern bigots away from the Democratic Party and into the GOP fold with racist dog whistles. It worked. The South today is virtually solid red.

And these aren’t your grandfather’s Republicans. They don’t bother anymore with dog whistles. Of late, they’ve been remarkably open about rewriting laws to make it harder for urban residents (read: minorities) to vote, and easier to discard their votes after they do. They’ve been banning classic works of Black literature from school libraries and prohibiting discussion of race in classrooms. They still strongly support a former (and possibly future) president with a long, grotesque history of racism — most recently, in suggesting that pending criminal investigations against him are illegitimate because the prosecutors are Black.

All the while, they accuse Democrats of engaging in identity politics — that is, premising political support based in part on factors like race, gender or religion.

A prime example might be (oh, just hypothetically) a governor who declares that he would never appoint a state public health director who wasn’t practicing “Christian values.” Of course, that would also be a clear violation of the constitutional separation of church and state.

But that didn’t stop Missouri Gov. Mike Parson from tweeting out such a declaration last month. Yet we don’t hear any of Parson’s fellow Republicans lambasting him for this obvious (and obviously illegal) exercise in identity politics.

Sometimes their lack of self-awareness becomes such self-parody that you’re almost embarrassed for them. Cruz, for example, decried ruling out potential nominees based on “wrong skin pigment and wrong Y chromosome.”

The good senator needs a history lesson.

Of the 115 justices confirmed since 1789, 108 have had white skin and Y chromosomes. That was always the sole imaginable outcome of the “race/gender litmus test,” until Thurgood Marshall’s confirmation in 1967. The only reason no president has ever declared, I’ll only consider a white male for this seat, is because, for the first 178 years of the court’s history, that was assumed. Every other race or gender was, to use Cruz’s word, “ineligible,” as surely as if the White House had announced it in advance.

The truth is that, with the Supreme Court — as with the presidency, Congress, corporate America and most other perches of power throughout most of U.S. history — there has always been a race/gender litmus test. It isn’t the long-standing reality of identity politics that has Republicans so aggravated right now; it’s that they think, this time, it’s benefiting the wrong identity.

Kevin McDermott is a member of the Post-Dispatch Editorial Board.