MSNBC anchor Joy Reid said, Wednesday on her show “The ReidOut” that it was “scandalous” that Supreme Court Associate Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas were on the Supreme Court deciding abortion cases.
While discussing the replacement for retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, The Nation’s justice correspondent Elie Mystal said, “We should not have an issue about their qualifications, to say nothing of their moral qualification. Because I’m pretty sure, I don’t know this for a fact, but I am pretty sure that Joe Biden will not nominate somebody who has been credibly accused of trying to rape somebody when they were in high school. I’m pretty sure — I don’t know this for a fact that Joe Biden will not nominate someone who was accused of perjury in front of Congress at a previous confirmation hearing.”
Reid said, “I feel like in some ways Republican nominations have either been a bait and switch on black folks as when Clarence Thomas was nominated to replace the great Thurgood Marshall. So they’re saying, here look, we’re going to give you a black person, but it’s somebody whose agenda on the court is going to be antithetical to everything Thurgood Marshall stood for, which is also why it makes me happy to see Sherrilyn Ifill’s name on that list because she sits on that role at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. It’s all punitive or the highly stringent ideological regardless of their moral qualifications. You think of a Kavanaugh and the same with Clarence Thomas, the things they were accused of. The fact that that court decides whether women have control over our bodies, with two men on it like that, is scandalous for a democracy.”
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