Show me the perfect person, and I’ll show you someone you just don’t know yet. Show me the perfect president, and I’ll show you someone who only had the chance to serve for a day. Or less. President Jimmy Carter is an unsung hero. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that we know only about 1/10 of the fiercely important things he did as president.
h/t Jackie for sending me this article.
President Jimmy Carter’s diversification of the judiciary is one of the most important and least acknowledged achievements in presidential history: diversifying the federal judiciary. (Slate)
In December 1976, one month before beginning his single term as president, Jimmy Carter hosted some of the most preeminent civil rights figures and black leaders in the country at the stately governor’s mansion in Atlanta. Rep. Andrew Young, the Atlanta congressman and former executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was there to accept a position as ambassador to the United Nations. Judge Frank M. Johnson, a white federal judge whose landmark rulings helped end public segregation throughout the South, met with Carter to discuss a top role in the Department of Justice. Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr., also paid the president-elect a visit.
Then there was Democratic Sen. James Eastland of Mississippi. Eastland, whose name has returned to the news in 2019 following controversial comments by Joe Biden, had little in common with the civil rights leaders who visited Carter that week. Unapologetic about his white supremacist views, Eastland had once called school integration “a program designed to mongrelize the Anglo-Saxon race.” Carter, for his part, had been hoping to establish a level of diversity in his administration never before achieved by an American president. He also intended to diversify the federal judiciary. But Eastland was the powerful chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and by the traditions of that time, individual senators—backed by Eastland’s gavel—directly controlled who was nominated to the federal bench. Carter hadn’t invited Eastland to Atlanta for a job: He was asking him to relinquish this enormous power, and to do it for the sake of integrating the nation’s judgeships.
Eastland proved surprisingly receptive. (It’s possible the senator may not have recognized how serious Carter’s commitment to diversity was; in a bit of political maneuvering, Carter had campaigned against school busing but would enforce it while in office, creating the Department of Education in 1979 in part to focus on civil rights.) Eastland said he was proud to see a southerner in the White House and intended to do whatever he could to make Carter’s presidency a success. If that included allowing the new president to put some nontraditional judges on the bench, so be it.
The linchpin of Carter’s plan to revolutionize and diversify the judiciary depended on the creation of a brand-new federal commission to pick appeals court judges, wresting the power to make judicial nominations away from individual senators. Eastland told Carter he would endorse the commission and its power to select nominees at the appeals level. His one caveat: He couldn’t force his fellow senators to surrender their authority to select district court judges, a jealously guarded patronage system.
But Eastland kept his promise and then some: Over the next four years, a nominating commission was allowed to propose the most diverse array of appeals court judges up to that point in American history. Their nominees were frequently selected by the president, approved by the Judiciary Committee, and consented to by the Senate. What’s more, many senators further ended up deferring to a commission on district court judges, too: Carter would send Democrats handwritten pleas, while Republicans knew that without the White House they would not be the ones selecting nominees anyway.
Eastland kept his promise and then some.
The outcome transformed the judiciary for decades—and set a new precedent for the elevation of diverse nominees.
For this post, let’s focus on Jimmy Carter, other great democratic presidents and our rising Democratic stars. Maybe as Democrats we need our own PRIDE month.