Opinion: WASP, where is thy judicial sting?

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WASHINGTON -- The congressional White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Caucus today released a statement calling on President Obama to replace retiring Justice David H. Souter, an Episcopalian, with another white Protestant. Noting that the remaining justices comprise five Catholics, two Jews and Justice John P. Stevens, an 89-year-old Protestant, the caucus said: ‘Given the prominence of white Protestants in the legal profession, it is unconscionable that Justice Stevens would be the only representative of this important demographic on the nation’s highest court.’OK, I’m kidding. Does anyone care -- other than a few religion-obsessed bloggers -- that at least one of the leading candidates to succeed Souter is a Catholic? I don’t think so, any more than Protestants in my native state of Pennsylvania feel disenfranchised because the state’s governor is Jewish, as is one of the U.S. senators (Arlen Specter, unless he changes religions to improve his election chances). The other senator, Bob Casey, is a Catholic.

The decline of the WASP is old news (Peter Schrag wrote a book with that title in 1970), so why aren’t members of that ethnic/religious group demanding representation on the court? Don’t young white Protestant lawyers need role models?

Well, we know the answers: White Protetants are secure in their accomplishments in other sectors of society; religion isn’t the social marker it used to be; and anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism are, at least in most places, passe. (So, to a lesser extent, is prejudice against women and African-Americans.) Ironically, it was bias against Catholics and Jews that led to the unofficial creation of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Jewish’ seats on the 20th century Supreme Court. Such tokenism was designed less to achieve diversity than to attract votes.

The interesting question is whether the groups now celebrating what I have called ‘look like me’ diversity will eventually become self-confident to the point of no longer keeping score. I hope so, because the politics of Supreme Court appointments will become more complicated as new groups enter and excel in the legal profession. Check out how many of the young lawyers in the U.S. Solicitor General’s office are of South Asian origin. Hmm.... Maybe we need a ‘Protestant’ seat on the court after all.