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Notes -
It seems like on a body that is representative on the level of 9/300,000,000, you can find genuinely talented blacks out of the slightly over ten percent of that population with the right skin color. So Thomas doesn't surprise me. What surprises me is that recent dem appointments aren't even intended to be genuinely smart legal minds- RBG, as much as I disagreed with her, was clearly capable of good legal reasoning. So was Breyer, and is Kagan. Sotomayor and KJB are not, but the DNC doesn't and didn't care- they rule the way the DNC wants them to, who's going to point out that their reasoning for doing so is sophomoric nonsense.
I strongly suspect that this has to do with differences in attitude between the two parties- democrat's judges are intended, first and foremost, to rule in accordance with the party that nominated them, and dumb partisan hacks are the easiest route there. On the other hand for republicans the constitution is an actual document that has actual words in it, and it's important to nominate someone who has a consistent reading of those actual literal words with actual meanings. These people sometimes ruling against you is a cost of doing business because those are actual literal words that actually have meanings and you are of course not the expert on those words or their meanings.
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