President Obama, as is his right, has nominated to the US Supreme Court another white man from Harvard, Merrick Garland.
Yet Mr. Garland is highly unlikely to ever be confirmed given the Republican leadership’s unanimous position that no Presidential nominee will be confirmed while President Obama remains in office.
The question raised by California’s more than six million Asian Americans and the nation’s twenty million Asian Americans is why did the President forgo an opportunity to win over our nation’s 130 million minorities and those who did not graduate from Harvard Law School?
As the President and Congress know well, in our nation’s more than 225-year history, no Asian American has ever been nominated for or served at the U.S. Supreme Court. However, an increasingly large pool of highly qualified, non-controversial Asian American jurists are available to be nominated. This includes California’s highly qualified Ninth Circuit Appellate Justice Jacqueline Nguyen and Sri Srinivasan, also highly qualified and noncontroversial from the D.C. Court of Appeals.
We raise the question of ignoring Asian Americans in the context of both Asian American judges being highly qualified immigrants and being relatively noncontroversial. Further, nomination of an Asian American jurist would be consistent with both President Obama’s call for more diversity and the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s call for more diversity, including ending the Harvard/Yale law school monopoly at the Supreme Court.
We are particularly mystified given that Mr. Garland is one of the oldest candidates nominated for the Supreme Court since Richard Nixon’s day and President Obama has the opportunity to win over the Asian American vote over the long term whether or not an Asian American candidate is confirmed. In contrast, both Jacqueline Nguyen and Sri Srinivasan are under 50, as was Justice Scalia when he was successfully nominated by President Reagan (President Obama’s nominee is 63, which is a little too old to provide an enduring legacy. This is particularly so since a number of Americans believe that a mechanism should be put in place for mandatory or strongly encouraged retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court after the age of 75.)
Since the President’s nomination of Mr. Garland will be futile, perhaps the President should consider an option that will encourage Mr. Garland to withdraw and provide the President the option of nominating our first Asian American to the Supreme Court. This is a viable option since some nominees have withdrawn in the past when facing strong hurdles to confirmation.
The advantage to the President includes the potential to convert what will be 50 million Asian Americans by 2050 to the Democratic Party. Although Asian Americans now strongly tilt to the Democratic Party in national elections, this was not the case under President Reagan. Therefore, a reinvigorated Republican Party whose Presidential candidate supports immigrants could evenly split the Asian American vote including securing a majority of Asian American business leaders.
Although the authors of this article have different political views, one generally supporting the Republican Party and the other supporting the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, we both concur that the Asian American vote, given its growing size, educational attainment and wealth accumulation should not tilt toward any major party. As other minorities have learned, we are often far more influential when our votes are up for grabs in both national and local elections. For example, the general absence of viable Republican candidates, particularly on a statewide level, has meant that minorities in California are disproportionately ignored since their votes are far too predictable.
As of the writing of this Op-Ed, we are endeavoring to meet with the President on this matter. The meeting will include a broad range of Asian American leaders from both parties. However, we are not unduly optimistic given that the President rejected our mid-February request to meet with him in D.C. during a time when we met with Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, the Chairs of the FDIC and FTC, and the Director of CFPB on income and wealth inequality.
(Faith Bautista and Jeff Nino Lim)
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Jeff Nino Lim is the owner of 15 Island Pacific Supermarkets and Chair of National Asian American Coalition and an immigrant
