27 January—Associate Justice Stephen Breyer has announced his retirement—long awaited by Democrats who aren’t looking forward to 2024—from the U.S. Supreme Court. The bad news is that it leaves only two Oxford alums (alumna Elena Kagan; and alumnus Neil Gorsuch, who, like Breyer, was a Marshall scholar) on the SCOTUS bench. Equally unimportant, of course, both Breyer and Gorsuch are married to Brits. Women, as it happens.

Liberal commentators like to say that Breyer has been a fairly moderate liberal on the bench. I shouldn’t go too far on the moderate bit, but he could have been worse. His decisions, dissents, and obiter dicta are somewhat more pragmatic than one might expect.

Breyer’s retirement leaves a SCOTUS vacancy that Joe Biden has promised to fill with a black woman. And that really stinks to high heaven. Not the black woman part, to be sure; but, first, that Biden made the promise in the first place, obviously just to get minority votes; and, second, that color or race come into it at all.

Nor should politics or litmus tests on issues like abortion and gun rights come into the appointment of SCOTUS justices or any judges. Dream on. Politics is in everything from law to religion to sports to entertainment to you name it—and, sadly but realistically, always has been.

Associate Justice Clarence Thomas should appreciate a new black female justice. To remind him of good old Anita Hill, whom he never laid a hand on or even propositioned but was nevertheless pilloried for being a guy. Which of course he strenuously denied.

Clarence’s wife, Virginia, who happens to be a white lawyer, is a right-wing lobbyist and activist who writes about such things as the “fascist left.” And, while she may be a nut case on too many issues, she makes some very good points.

Six years ago, having heard commentators on left-wing radio refer to newly minted Senator Murphy as “Senator Small Ball,” I wrote in the Republican-American, “It looks like Senator Small Ball and Senator Big Mouth are at it again. Connecticut’s junior U.S. senator, Democrat Christopher Murphy (Small Ball or SB) and his senior colleague and mentor, Democrat Richard Blumenthal (Big Mouth or BM), are grandstanding in yet another blatantly self-serving effort to get their names in the press.”

Back then, Connecticut’s self-serving senatorial creep duo wanted to make gun violence into a disease, “presumably the first step to making firearms into drugs that could be controlled—and ultimately banned—by the Food and Drug Administration.”

That didn’t happen. But just the other day SB and BM bitched to the press because they had been denied access to the women’s facility of the Danbury Federal Correctional Institution. Those buggers must think they have the right to do anything that suits their perverted fancy.

Getting right to the point, then, while SB and BM were within the confines of the Danbury slammer, why in the name of all that’s right couldn’t they have been locked up? And detained indefinitely and incommunicado.

And, as I type this, Kamala Harris is actually out of the country.

May it ever be thus . . .