Thread by @davidfrum

It's not a new thing to use Supreme Court appointments to score social "firsts" ... a thread. 1/x

In 1887, President Grover Cleveland decided the time had come to appoint the first Deep Southerner to the Supreme Court since the civil war. (President Hayes had appointed Kentuckyian John Marshall Harlan in 1877, but Harlan had fought for the Union.) 2/x

Cleveland had squeaked into office in 1884 by the tiniest of margins. Facing a tough re-elect in 1888 (which he would lose), Cleveland wanted to excite the white conservative Southern base of his Democratic party. The nomination was a chance to try. 3/x

So Cleveland nominated Lucius Quintus Lamar of Mississippi, a former senator then serving as Cleveland's secretary of the interior. But Lamar was not just any Mississippian ... 4/x

Lamar had been author of the Mississippi ordinance of secession. He served in the Confederate army, then as the CSA's special envoy to seek British and French help in the war. After the war, he fiercely opposed the Reconstruction constitutional amendments. 5/x

As a US senator, Lamar led Democrats in sabotaging what little remained of voting rights enforcement in the South after the deal that secured the presidency for Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877. 6/x

So as you can imagine, there was considerable controversy over the appointment of Lamar to the high court a decade later. Some of that controversy is detailed in this (paywalled) article 7/x onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.11…

The key point for our present purposes: backers of the Lamar nomination made clear at every turn that they were supporting him because of his identity as an unreconstructed ex-Confederate. 8/x

EG The Memphis Daily Appeal, then one of the most important papers in the South, praised him as a worthy successor to Roger Taney and John Campbell - two members of the Dred Scott majority. Campbell had then resigned from the Court to fight for the Confederacy. 9/x

The confirmation vote split on party lines: Democrats voted 29-0 to confirm; Republicans voted 28-2 against. Lamar was elevated to the high court by a majority of the vote; the judicial filibuster had not yet been invented in the 1880s. 10/x

In his short career on the court - he died in 1893 - Lamar wrote only one memorable opinion: his dissent from a case that upheld the authority of the United States to protect a person in federal custody from lynching. 11/x

Few today would see much to be proud of in the career and record of Justice Lucius Quintus Lamar. He was selected for the crassest of political reasons - and did little good with his grand opportunity. 12/x

But Lamar's career can deliver a humbling caution against the delusion that the Supreme Court is some above-the-fray abode of disembodied legal geniuses. 13/x

We've developed an etiquette that presidents need to speak as if SCOTUS seats were awarded on the same basis as, say, Nobel Prizes in Chemistry. Maybe Joe Biden should have followed that etiquette. But presidents don't *think* that way about the court. Never have. Never will. END