One thing worth considering is what would happen if Republicans were as committed to paying off promises to their supporters as Democrats are. It’s hard to fathom such a possibility. The rolling controversy which began when Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer was essentially bounced from the Court has brought the question to light.

It turns out that President Joe Biden is only really in office because he made a promise to some sleazy politicians that better than three-quarters of the public thinks shouldn’t have been made. But that shouldn’t surprise anyone, should it? Legal Insurrection‘s William A. Jacobson said:

In the course of my research, I learned more details about Biden’s pledge to appoint a Black woman to SCOTUS. It was not some “racial justice” or “equity” or “diversity” or similar move. It was not high-minded, ideological or philosophical at all. It was a quid pro quo for South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn’s campaign endorsement, which proved crucial to Biden winning the nomination.

ABC News reports:

At President Joe Biden’s lowest moment in the 2020 campaign, South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn came to him with a suggestion: He should pledge to put the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.

After some cajoling, Biden made the promise at a Democratic debate, a move Clyburn credits with turning out the Black support that helped Biden score a resounding victory in the South Carolina primary and ultimately win the White House.

The New York Times adds more details:

Mr. Biden made the promise at a debate in February 2020, just days before facing his Democratic rivals in the South Carolina primary, where Black people make up a large portion of the party’s voters. At the time, his campaign was struggling amid losses in two of the early presidential contests.

“I’m looking forward to making sure there’s a Black woman on the Supreme Court to make sure we in fact get everyone represented,” Mr. Biden said that night.

The promise helped Mr. Biden secure the support of Representative James Clyburn, a veteran Black Democrat from South Carolina, just days ahead of the party’s contest in that state. Last year, Mr. Clyburn confirmed a report in the book “Peril,” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, that he had urged Mr. Biden to make the promise during the debate.”

Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, in their book Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency, recount a story about that debate. He’d promised Clyburn he’d appoint a black female Supreme Court justice, but he was on stage at that debate and hadn’t openly said it. Clyburn confronted him backstage during a break and demanded that he go public, and Biden did. That got Clyburn’s endorsement in advance of the South Carolina primary, and it was pivotal to rescuing Biden’s then-flagging campaign.

Naturally, this wasn’t all that heavily reported at the time. But Clyburn and his pals certainly remembered it.

And last week when Biden pledged he’d restrict his Supreme Court options in the wake of Breyer being removed from the Court — yes, yes, he chose to retire, but the announcement was made for him and it’s pretty obvious the timing of his departure was decided on by someone else — to black women and black women only, it’s fairly clear it’s Biden being held to that promise.

So Jacobson is right that this is essentially just a slimy backroom political deal playing out. But it takes an old-school racist like Joe Biden both to make that deal and to stick by it.

Even though it’s an absolute political disaster on practically every front for Team Biden to proceed with this shamble of a process:

A new ABC News/Ipsos poll finds that a plurality of Americans view the Supreme Court as motivated by partisanship, while President Joe Biden’s campaign trail vow to select a Black woman to fill a high-court vacancy without reviewing all potential candidates evokes a sharply negative reaction from voters.

The ABC News/Ipsos poll, which was conducted by Ipsos in partnership with ABC News using Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel, comes days after the most senior member of the Supreme Court, Justice Stephen G. Breyer, announced his retirement at the end of the current term. Breyer’s announcement provides Biden the opportunity to change the demographic makeup of the conservative-leaning bench.

During the spring 2020 presidential primaries, days before his set of big wins on Super Tuesday, Biden pledged to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, if elected. Now, with the chance to do so, just over three-quarters of Americans (76%) want Biden to consider “all possible nominees.” Just 23% want him to automatically follow through on his history-making commitment that the White House seems keen on seeing through. At a ceremony honoring the retiring justice, Biden told reporters he is able to honor his promise without compromising on quality.

Nobody really believes that last part. Particularly not when the names being floated are pretty ordinary. The two most commonly named candidates are Ketanji Brown Jackson and Leondra Kruger, a pair of Harvard/Yale products cut from the Usual Suspect ruling-elite mold. When you have eight of the nine justices who hail from the Ivy League as is, it makes zero difference whether some of them are black — that isn’t diversity. They represent New Haven and Cambridge, not the inner city.

If we’re going to get a black woman, why not find somebody who went to a majority-black college and worked her way through law school at State U? We could at least respect that you’d have a judge from a background more typical of regular America. That would at least be interesting.

None of these people are remotely close to being as qualified as Janice Rogers Brown, who retired from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017 after a dozen years and served on the California Supreme Court from 1996 to 2005 before that. I mention Brown because in 2003, when she first came up for confirmation to the D.C. Circuit, Joe Biden filibustered the nomination. Then he did it again, unsuccessfully, in 2005 when Brown was renominated. Brown was even up for a Supreme Court seat, but George W. Bush went with Samuel Alito — far and away his best pick — instead.

Janice Rogers Brown, unlike the people on Biden’s shortlist, came from an incredible life story. She wasn’t the cookie-cutter privileged Harvard-Yale product. She was the daughter of an Alabama sharecropper who worked her way up, graduating from Cal State-Sacramento and then the University of Virginia Law School. And Brown was a pretty independent judge with often controversial libertarian views. No wonder Biden and other Democrats like Barack Obama hated her so much. They usually do hate interesting people.

After all, it’s like Biden said: if you won’t vote for him, and Brown certainly wouldn’t have, then “you ain’t black!” Because who else but Joe Biden would run his Supreme Court nominations in such a shabby, low-rent fashion which taints the achievements of his nominee while enabling him to swagger indecently that he’s A Man Of His Word?

At the end of the day, it probably doesn’t matter because with Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, the bar is set pretty low when it comes to the Democrats’ contributions to the Supreme Court in modern times. But Biden’s shortlist doesn’t have any superstar names like Janice Rogers Brown on it. Not even close. There’s a reason the public is panning this idea so heavily — people get that Biden isn’t trying to find the best Supreme Court justice.

And the worst of it is that even if Jackson or Kruger, for example, ends up being the nominee and does fabulously well in the nomination process, she’ll always get dinged as a diversity hire. And whose fault is that?

Joe Biden’s.

Why would you publicly come out and say you’re only looking for a black woman? Why not just say you’re looking for the best and end up nominating a black woman? What Biden has done is to explicitly segregate the Supreme Court process in an effort to essentially make it “separate but equal.” The form of this thing is what’s so annoyingly racist about it and why the public is so disgusted.

The effect of this is nobody gets to find out about other, not-black-female potential Supreme Court candidates to see if there might be any talent out there in the frightening event that Biden might have another opportunity to fill a seat on the Court. There was a sizable tempest-in-a-teapot over that question at Georgetown Law School when executive director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution Ilya Shapiro touted Sri Srinivasan as a superior pick to anybody on Biden’s list and was then hammered into silence for his impertinence.

Not to mention that in the Bakke decision, the Supreme Court explicitly ruled that racial quotas were unconstitutional. Along comes doddering old Joe Biden and his repellant political payoffs to publicly piddle all over that ruling in making a hire for the very institution that handed it down. (READ MORE: The Big Lie of Biden’s ‘Black Woman’ Court Promise)

All of this is absurd. It’s unworkable. It’s typical Biden, but that’s why he’s such a transformationally awful president, like a James Buchanan or Herbert Hoover.

Let’s say Jackson is the nominee. It’ll mean she won out in a process limited to people who look like her and have similar plumbing. It will certainly not mean she’s the best possible Supreme Court pick.

Honestly, she ought to turn down a nomination made on that basis because to accept it means she’s perfectly fine with a racially biased process, and it’ll mean she’s willing to put aside the concept of a colorblind America in favor of racial bean-counting, if not get-evenism. It’ll basically mean she’s a distaff Ibram X. Kendi in a judicial robe, and that is a bad look for all kinds of reasons.

And it’ll mean that statue of Lady Justice, blindfolded, in front of the Supreme Court ought to be taken down.

Thomas Sowell, who is cast poorly as a white supremacist, though today’s modern Left most assuredly wouldn’t flinch from calling him one, once noted that the Left doesn’t want to end racism but rather to put it under new management. Well, Joe Biden has been a pretty brazen racist from the beginning of his political career, and particularly from the time he took to the Senate floor to decry the “racial jungle” his kids would grow up in as a result of busing in public schools.

Not much has changed in the intervening years; Biden still sees black people as a collective and not as individuals, and he’s never seen America in a colorblind way. But he’s surely recognized a way to flip his racism over for personal benefit, to put it under new management.

It’s under Jim Clyburn’s management, and those of his cronies, now.

The safe bet is on the American people, and even a whole lot of black folks (and especially a fat share of Hispanics and Asians, not to mention white people), becoming very disgusted with using the Supreme Court for explicit diversity hires. Even if she’s confirmed, this will backfire, both on Biden and on his nominee.

Martin Luther King Jr. would be horrified.