Obama Supreme Court Candidate Deval Patrick—Part 1
[Ed Whelan]
Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick is another highly touted contender for a Supreme Court appointment by a President Obama. As the Boston Globe reported two months ago in an article entitled “Speculation swirls around a Patrick appointment”:

Legal blogs have been spreading Patrick’s name as a potential Supreme Court pick for at least a year. In recent months, both The New York Times and The Washington Post have mentioned Patrick either first or second in stories handicapping potential Obama high-court nominees.

Deval Patrick has made his mark on the law in the field of racial preferences. Let’s take a look at his remarkable record:

1. As assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Clinton administration, Patrick—in the words of Jeffrey Rosen in a 1994 New Republic article—“committed the Clinton administration to a vision of racial preference that fulfills the most extravagant fantasies of a conservative attack ad.” Specifically, Patrick argued in a brief in Taxman v. Piscataway that “it is legal to fire a white teacher over a black teacher purely because of her race.” As Rosen explains, Patrick’s position that “affirmative action” principles permit “firing someone on account of race crosses a crucial line” that had been “widely accepted by liberals and conservatives.” Patrick “blithely endorsed the most extreme form of racialism” and did so “with a series of evasions”.

2. More generally, Patrick as AAG aggressively pursued and defended racial preferences and racial line-drawing across the board—in employment, government contracting, and gerrymandering—even in the face of contrary Supreme Court rulings. Patrick was notorious for his tactics of intimidation and abuse. Even liberal senator Carol Moseley Braun (whose seat Barack Obama occupies) decried Patrick’s “Gestapo techniques” that “run roughshod over citizens, over communities.”