It’s a sad day, but not an unexpected one, when Fox’s lone Black woman anchor, Harris Faulkner, complains that President Joe Biden’s pledge to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court is “discrimination.”
Faulkner has long been a shameless, right-wing propagandist. But it’s especially sad to see her fall in line with white supremacist Tucker Carlson.
Shortly after news broke of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s resignation, Faulkner surely made Carlson proud.
In a discussion with Fox News' Jonathan Turley about Breyer, Turley reminded viewers that “President Biden has already pledged that he will only consider an African-American woman for the court.”
Faulkner replied, “What you’re talking about is discrimination, and what we’re about to see now is if the president of the United States would engage in that against a court which would say no to it otherwise.”
Then, ignoring how racial animosity and bigotry is at the core of Fox News’ conservative politics, Faulkner said, with unintended irony, “Race is at the heart of just about everything we see from the left right now.”
Faulkner went on to baselessly suggest that Biden plans to appoint Kamala Harris to Breyer's seat. “So this person has to be a woman, she has to be Black and she’s got to be younger. Anybody thinking what I’m thinking? They don’t know what to do with Kamala Harris in the White House right now. I can’t be the only person seeing this.”
“It’s hard not to see at least she makes the list,” Faulkner added, before tossing to cohost Kayleigh McEnany.
“I think you’re right,” compulsive liar McEnany said. “I’m glad you said that, Harris, because that was playing in my mind from the moment we heard about this retirement.”
McEnany had a momentary fit of truth-telling. “There’s no reporting to this at the moment, so this is just speculation,” she said. The fit passed as McEnany opined that Harris is on the short list. “There’s a ton of reporting, Harris, as we’ve covered here on the show that people aren’t quite happy with Kamala Harris, both in the West Wing, outside of the West Wing, Democrat operatives, so it’s a possibility. I think she’s at least on the short list, and maybe it’s a position she’d readily want to consider given the challenges of the vice presidency.”
The speculation is apparently based on a rumor briefly mentioned in a December CNN report about White House frustration with Harris. But more recent CNN reporting has debunked the notion.
You can watch it below, from the January 26, 2022 Outnumbered.
(Harris image via screenshot)
And let’s be clear about the outcome of this appointment. It will not change anything about the makeup of the Supreme Court. Replacing Breyer with another centrist moderate means we will stay at 3 centrist moderates/mild liberals while the Right will continue to enjoy having a supermajority of 6 Far Right idealogues, with 5 of them being wildly beyond understandable norms. An actual shift in the Court would require the resignations of at least two of the Far Right idealogues, and that is unlikely for at least another decade, if not two. A replacement for Breyer just means that the current disaster does not get any worse just yet. The howls from the Right indicate either that they just want to try to bully the Dems into a defensive crouch or that they truly think they can bully everyone into letting them have a 7-3 uber-majority of Far Right idealogues.
Regarding Reagan’s appointment of Sandra Day O’Connor to the SC, we should remember he was not just appointing a female Justice to curry favor. Reagan’s handlers were using a short list of Right Wing women who passed the infamous “litmus test” started under that White House to make sure any potential appointee would be a reliable Right Wing vote. (The Right was skeptical of just naming Republicans after Warren Burger turned out to not be sufficiently loyal and after both Harry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens moved to the center.) O’Connor was not only grilled by the handlers; she was brought to Reagan, who personally interrogated her to be sure that she found reproductive choice “abhorrent.” Reagan’s point was that the justice might be female so he could say that he’d appointed the first woman. But she would be a reliably Right Wing Republican woman. O’Connor would become a swing vote in time, but her fulcrum was decidedly to the Right of where the SC’s middlepoint had been before.
When Saint Ronald (Oh, may his name be blessed) ran afoul of Republican women over his dropping of support for the ERA act from his platform in 1980, he made a desperate move to regain their votes – a solemn undertaking to appoint a woman to the first available seat. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… Sandra Day O’Connor.
