Luck be a lady

President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court pick will be the first to be nominated by a Democratic President in the last 15 years. According to the Associated Press, Obama pledged last Friday to name a Supreme Court justice who combines “empathy and understanding.”

Many people in the United States have their predictions: Oprah Winfrey, Anita Hill and most importantly, Michelle Obama. With the announcement of retirement from Justice David Souter, speculation of who the next justice will be has predominantly been set on having a woman in the seat. And why not?

The first President Bush nominated Justice David Souter, who is currently 69 years old, to the Supreme Court in 1990. But on abortion and many other issues, Souter did not have as strong of a conservative point of view as the GOP had expected. Souter was by far the only justice that resembled a similarity to the way the United States actually looks. He was the only one with actual experience, and by him retiring, the outlook of the Supreme Court reflects none of the “melting pot” of the country. There are many things the Supreme Court is missing in the 21st century.

According to an article by Michael Doyle for McClatchy Newspapers, Justice David Souter’s retirement will leave Obama with “a court consisting of six white men, one white woman and one African-American man. Even if the president appoints another woman, as many expect, the court will remain strikingly uniform.”

The article goes on to note that other under-represented groups of people haven’t been considered in the past, stating, “The Supreme Court, for instance, has never had a Latino justice, an Asian-American justice or an openly gay justice. None of the current justices has disabilities. None of the current justices has ever held elected office .… Eight of the nine justices earned their law degrees from Ivy League schools. Six have never served in the military. Five are Roman Catholic. Religious fidelity appears even more de rigueur: Only one justice in the court’s history failed to declare membership in a church, and that was in the mid-19th century.”

More so, not only is Obama a legendary president because he is the first African-American President of the United States, but he also has an opportunity to nominate a Supreme Court justice that could potentially shape the ideology of the United States long after President Obama is gone. I think nominating a woman could change the way the Court rules on issues of abortion or women’s rights, and why not if 51 percent of the female population in the United States is represented only by one woman out of nine Supreme Court Justices?

Even before the announcement of Souter’s retirement, Obama was two steps ahead of the game by thinking of who he would appoint if there was a chance. On July 17, 2007 Obama told a Planned Parenthood conference that what he wants in a judge is: “… somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or elderly. And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.”

If anything, I not only respect how much President Obama has done for us now, but also look forward to having a change in the way America is represented. Perhaps it is time to go back to the foundation of the way the Supreme Court was supposed to be shaped: a collection of people with broad experiences and backgrounds instead of elite, white men who govern everything when no one around them can relate.