Phyllis Schlafly has dedicated her most recent column to making the rather odd demand that the next Supreme Court nominee must be a military veteran and that vets in the Senate must pressure him to make such a nomination, because his “disdain for the military is no secret”:
For as long as we can remember, the U.S. Supreme Court has included at least one military veteran. Recent examples include Republican-appointed Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who died in 2005, and Justice John Paul Stevens, who is expected to resign this year.
The Democrats have not placed a veteran on the Supreme Court in nearly half a century. When President Obama fills Stevens’ seat, will the high court be left without anyone who has military experience?
Veterans in the U.S. Senate should make sure that such an embarrassment does not occur. Cases concerning the military appear every year before the Supreme Court, and our nation will not be well-served by a court lacking in military experience … Obama’s disdain for the military is no secret, and the leading names on his short list for possible Supreme Court appointment are as anti-military as he is. The number of veterans in Congress has declined to about 21 percent, but that’s enough for them to make a public demand that high-court diversity include a veteran.
Schlafly then goes on to attack possible SCOTUS nominees including Elena Kagan, Diane Wood, Cass Sunstein, and Harold Koh, all for reasons that have nothing to do with military service, before finally criticizing Obama’s recess appointment of Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board, as if any of that has anything to do with her incoherent demand:
Obama thumbed his nose at the Senate, but the Senate should not allow him to thumb his nose at our armed services by replacing the last decorated veteran on the Supreme Court with a non-veteran. The men and women who risk their lives for our nation’s security deserve better.
And all this time I thought Schlafly vehemently opposed anything that smacked of quotas.
