What Really Matters

In the days and weeks that passed between Justice O’Connor’s announced retirement and the president’s announcement of her successor speculation was justifiably rampant about just who the nominee would be. The relevant question throughout the whole process, in my view at least, was would the president nominate someone in the mold of a Scalia or Thomas, as he had previously indicated he would, or would he nominate a more results-oriented nominee such as the departing Justice O’Connor, thus avoiding a contentious confirmation fight in the Senate?

Instead, the question most commonly chewed on was whether the president was compelled to nominate a woman or a minority to replace the court’s first female justice. It got to the point where any reasonable person could have been forgiven for believing that the president was searching for someone to fill a diversity slot, not an open vacancy on the United States Supreme Court. The dialogue increasingly concerned itself more with identity politics than the more substantive issues it should have concerned itself with.

Now, to the president’s credit he selected the best person available for the job, and substance and merit carried the day, as it always should. He approached the vacancy looking for the person most capable, whose legal credentials, temperament, philosophy, and intellect were best suited for the nation’s highest court. Such an approach is the correct one, and it should be the model for filling any vacancy, Supreme Court or otherwise. Factors such as race, gender, religion, etc., are, for the most part, superficial and irrelevant.

One would also hope that we as a society have matured enough so that the implicit need to nominate someone simply for the purpose of creating an illusion of equality no longer exists. Selecting someone on the basis of race or gender doesn’t bring about equality, it only creates greater inequality, for it automatically results in the exclusion of someone else for the very same reason, leaving us right back where we started.

We all want equality, but there is a right way and a wrong way to achieve it. Equality is completely unattainable except through liberty, the liberty to compete with all others on the basis of your own personal merit and talents. Each individual must be regarded as just that, an individual, and not as some label. Until this standard is reached equality will simply be a dream which we vainly seek but are never able to attain.