Stupid or Dishonest? Schumer Falsely Claims Supreme Court Was All White Until 1981

Trying to justify Old Joe Biden’s decision to limit his Supreme Court candidates to black women only, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-Sinister) on Thursday claimed that Old Joe was just trying to redress a historic injustice. “Until 1981,” Chuck intoned, “this powerful body, the Supreme Court, was all white men. Imagine. America wasn’t all white men in 1981, or ever. Under President Biden and this Senate majority, we’re taking historic steps to make the courts look more like the country they serve.” Schumer, of course, left out Thurgood Marshall, the first black Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. And so the question once again arises: is Schumer stupid, dishonest?

Those are really the only two choices. Stephen Kruiser on Friday morning called Schumer a “paste-eating fool,” and forgetting the existence of Thurgood Marshall would certainly seem to reinforce that assessment. On August 30, 1967, when Marshall became a Supreme Court Justice, Schumer had just graduated from high school as valedictorian of his class and was entering Harvard College, where he immediately became politically active, working on the presidential campaign of Eugene McCarthy in 1968. In all that time, as a clearly politically aware young man, did he never hear that Lyndon Johnson had appointed a black man to the Supreme Court? Did Schumer never once hear of Marshall any time after that during the twenty-four years Marshall served on the Court, as Schumer attended Harvard Law School, became a New York State Assemblyman, and after that a Congressman? (He became a Senator after Marshall had retired.)

Of course Schumer has heard of Thurgood Marshall. The justice just slipped his mind when he was speaking on Thursday, right? Sure. It could happen to any of us. But as of this writing, Schumer has issued no correction or clarification. Ironically, his Twitter feed is filled with tweets for Black History Month, commemorating Rosa Parks, Ethel Waters, and Connie Mitchell (“the first Black woman elected in Monroe County, NY”), but there is no sign of Thurgood Marshall.

So is Schumer just abysmally stupid, as Stephen noted, or actively dishonest?

The most likely answer is that he is both. His speech defending Biden’s racism and sexism was put together by some miseducated millennial staffer who doesn’t know Thurgood Marshall from Marshall Matt Dillon (another name from the murky past), and Schumer is so uninterested and disengaged that he didn’t notice the omission, or care if he did. After all, he could very well have said, “Until 1967, this powerful body, the Supreme Court, was all white men” and decried the injustice of that, and his argument would have been perfectly reasonable. But to say 1981 instead of 1967 makes the injustice all the worse, and that works in Schumer’s favor. Why correct the record when the false narrative makes your point even more effectively than the truth would?

Related: Inside Chuck Schumer’s Disastrous First Year

This has been the Democrat party playbook for years. When the facts don’t fit, throw them out and push the narrative, no matter what. This has particularly been the case in connection with Supreme Court nominees, going back to Ted Kennedy’s shameful smear of Reagan nominee Robert Bork in 1987. “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.”

Instead of repudiating such demagoguery and censuring Kennedy, the Democrats embraced this tactic and have used it innumerable times since, in all sorts of contexts. Schumer, by conveniently forgetting Thurgood Marshall, isn’t indulging in the same sort of base character assassination, but he is engaging in the same bending of the truth for partisan and self-serving purposes.

If we had any journalists in America today, they might ask Schumer to clarify and correct his remarks, but of course, we do not. The “journalists” working today for the most part are selling the same narrative Schumer is retailing here, and so they have no interest in showing his error. So Biden and Schumer will get their “Supreme Court that looks like America” but votes like authoritarian Leftists almost every time, and the Democrats’ idolatry of race and blood will continue.