"Cookie cutter" from Daily Kos by kos

Chris Matthews thinks Obama picking a Latina Supreme Court justice would be a "cookie cutter" move.

Will he go to the usual cookie cutter. He's supposed to pick a latina, a hispanic woman, would be a woman. Would he do that just because that's sort of the unfilled void in his patronage plan so far?

Digby:

Right, I guess a cookie cutter candidate is now someone who is a darker hued, feminine kind of cookie. After all, the women and the minorities are just overflowing the Supreme Court with unqualified losers and the poor white guys can't catch a break. This absurd conversation is happening all over TV today.

What, isn't the president enough for the brown people? Seriously, I don't offend easily, but this full-throated media defense of the oppressed white male today is deeply offensive to me.

The argument is that by excluding white men from consideration, that the court may be deprived of the "most qualified" individual. Moving beyond the crazy notion that there is such a thing as a "most qualified" person (this isn't Highlander, where there can only be one), do those champions of the downtrodden white male really think that the court has ever been a meritocracy? Does it so happen that in our nation's history, the "most qualified" person has always gotten the appointments, and that they just so happen to have always been white dudes?

There have been 110 Justices on the Supreme Court. Of those, two have been women, and two have been black. The other 106 have been white men. That means that around 96 percent of Supreme Court justices have been white men. Truly, when it comes to getting named to the Supreme Court, white men can't get a break.

Right. They can't. Let me pause here to tear out my hair.

There are women and Latinos and African Americans and Asians (and combinations thereof) that are just as qualified as the top white dudes vying for a court slot. But rather than lean on their social networks to give them a leg up, they now have to compete with a much wider qualified pool. That sucks for them, yes. Their daddies didn't have to compete against the colored guys and broads. But it's a new world.

And when you have a batch of equally qualified people, it makes perfect sense to look to those who bring experiences and values to the court which it currently finds lacking. And yes, that means addressing gender and racial/ethnic imbalances, giving the court a much broader mix of experiences to draw on when debating decisions.

Much in the same way, I also agree with those urging Obama to look beyond the appellate courts to elected officials and other non-traditional sources of judges. Sometimes, legal theory needs to be tempered with real-world experiences to help make the law more practical and responsive to the people, rather than a theoretical or academic exercise.

But would looking outside of the appellate court system be a huge outrage and insult to all appellate court judges? Of course not. There's nine of them sitting on the court right now. Heck, I'd love to see a Supreme Court justice who didn't go to an Ivy League law school. Great jurists come out of even modest state-funded law schools. Why should they be passed by because they didn't have the money, right connections, or other such factors to attend an elite legal institution?

Diversifying the backgrounds and experiences of the sitting justices will ultimately provide for a far better court than having a bunch of ivy-league educated white dudes who spent their lives working up the court system.

But of course, the suff about law schools and job background aren't as interesting as railing against the raw deal those poor oppressed white dudes are getting. So now we're stuck listening to white dudes on the TV and in newspapers rail against their poor lot in life.

Time to get back to tearing out my hair.