CONFIRMED: Nancy Abudu to the Eleventh Circuit.
She’s spent a majority of her career as a civil rights lawyer defending the rights of all Americans, and she will be the first Black woman to ever serve on this court.
An invaluable perspective. pic.twitter.com/CyNCYkXEMf
— Senate Judiciary Committee (@JudiciaryDems) May 18, 2023
The ancient & semi-honorable Friday News Dump tradition has me waiting to post about several breaking stories, not least (*sigh*) Senator Feinstein’s terrible situation. Meanwhile, here’s a post suggesting that some of the not-completely-insane ‘conservatives’ are steeling themselves for four more years of Biden, followed by… well…
Jill Lawrence, at the Bulwark, “13 Ways of Looking at Kamala Harris: Is it time to reset how you think about the vice president?”:
KAMALA HARRIS WAS AMONG FRIENDS at the annual fundraiser gala for EMILY’s List this week. Her smile dazzled as she talked of the “many joys” of being vice president, and her tone was by turns disbelieving and resolute as she described “book bans in this year of our Lord 2023” and “extremists” planning to go national with attacks on legal abortion, voting rights, gay rights, black history lessons, and more. Addressing a hall packed with cheering, applauding women, Harris said she and Joe Biden have been fighting to uphold and protect “hard-won rights and freedoms” for two years, “and now we need to finish the job.”
Is this focused, confident Kamala Harris the one we’ll see for the rest of the 2024 campaign?…
1. She seems like she’d be a fun friend. You can tell from watching her explain how to brine a turkey in a video recorded two days before Thanksgiving 2019 that went viral a year later, when she was vice president-elect. The clip shows Harris seizing the moment—a 90-second commercial break before going live on MSNBC—to answer questions from Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart’s husband, Nick…
2. A week after that seemingly carefree turkey tangent, Harris ended her presidential bid. It was a mercy killing for a mismanaged and unconvincing campaign. She had a divided, publicly unhappy staff, shifting positions on key issues, and no compelling rationale for why Democrats should nominate her.
3. Nevertheless, in June 2020, after George Floyd was murdered, I wrote that Biden’s choice came down to then-Rep. Val Demings, the former police chief of Orlando, Florida, or then-Sen. Harris, a former California attorney general and San Francisco district attorney. The idea was that either of them—gun-owning women of color who, like Biden himself, had taken incoming from all sides of the public safety debate—could credibly lead a national project to address racial inequities in policing, criminal justice, and more. I had moved on from the debate unpleasantness. Turns out Biden had, too…
7. The Senate Democrats’ “most acute questioner,” as New York Magazine once called Harris, earned the title by grilling attorneys general, Supreme Court nominees, and a Homeland Security secretary. Imagine her as an aggressive attorney general in a Biden administration or a hard-charging Senate Judiciary Committee chair in a Democratic Senate. Instead, as Biden’s understudy, she drew thankless, unachievable tasks such as getting a voting rights bill through a stalemated Senate and delving into the root causes of surging immigration. She was sent to countless foreign countries where she sank out of sight. She might make a better president for having done all that travel and met all those leaders…
TGIF Morning Open Thread: <em>Ooof</em>Post + Comments (350)