If Trump nominates Barbara Lagoa to replace RBG, will Democrats make the "second Latina" argument? I see 2 big problems!

"An effort to install a second Latina on the high court would immediately raise the stakes of a nomination fight that quickly became a clash over principles of fairness and democratic legitimacy."

I just wanted to isolate that sentence, which appears in the middle of a Washington Post article by Isaac Stanley-Becker and Aaron C. Davis and called "Barbara Lagoa, Cuban American judge, rises on Trump’s Supreme Court list as allies emphasize Florida campaign edge."

First, I see that word "install," which I blogged about at length when we saw it in the text of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dying wish: "My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."

As I explained at the time, "install" was not the normal word to use in the context of a new American President taking office. I won't be surprised to see a sudden vogue for "install." I'll be watching.

But that's not my motivation for writing this post. I want to talk about "a second Latina." Is this the incipient attack on Lagoa? We already have a Latina on the Court, so Trump, in a ham-handed attempt to do diversity, has failed! He would grossly over-represent Latinas on the Court!

Is that the attack they'd use or that they're testing right now or pretending that they'd use in order to scare Trump away from what would, in fact, be an excellent choice?

There are 2 big problems with the "second Latina" argument.

1. The "first Latina" is Sonia Sotomayor, who was born in the Bronx to parents who were born in Puerto Rico. Barbara Lagoa was born in Miami to parents who fled Cuba. You can group them together under the word "Latina," but if you care about diversity, you shouldn't be arguing that the proposed "second Latina" is just a repeat of an ethnicity already represented on the Court.

2. The "second Latina" argument radically exposes the problem with choosing people because of their ethnicity. You're saying just get one and then you've covered that group and you don't need another. This idea limits opportunities for those in the groups that you've posed as caring about. You're saying: We've got our Latina, so we don't need another; we can get back to hiring the type of person we always preferred.

I don't know if Trump will pick Barbara Lagoa, but I'll be very interested to see if Democrats unleash the "second Latina" argument. It's dangerous, and it should go horribly wrong.

What did Tom Brokaw say that had him apologizing so awkwardly last night on Twitter?

Let's read the original text, the transcript for "Meet the Press." I saw the show at the time, and I wasn't paying that much attention to the words. I was noticing how old and out of it Tom Brokaw looked and sounded. He is speaking on a panel moderated by Chuck Todd, and the subject, at this point, is the government shutdown. Brokaw says:

I really didn't think that you could widen the gap between the Beltway and the rest of the country any more, until this happened. And now, it's completely gone. 

Notice the incoherence. What is "completely gone"? The "gap"? He means the gap is much greater now, so he's saying the opposite of what he means.

I mean, you know, I told you earlier that I talked to these westerners who began by saying, "Like Trump, like his policies." Then, they said, "Wish he’d stop, wish he would stop tweeting all the time." Last time I talked to them, "He's a clown. I can't stand him. But it's still the policies that we believe in." 

How often does 78-year-old Tom Brokaw go out west and reinterview characters who give him the clichés he needs —  "stop tweeting all the time," "clown"? He's in trouble for what he said about Hispanics, but "these westerners" is also a stereotype.

But anywhere I go, Republican, Democrat, or Independent, "Why can't they talk to each other and find common ground?" Every community in America finds a way to build a new school or to do something about downtown. But here, we can't do it, because we breathe the same air. And it's toxic, in its own way, about what needs to be done and how seriously people take their very minute positions on something.

That's just generic ranting about how people in Washington can't work together.

Next panelist Hugh Hewitt opines that dealing with the political situation in Venezuela is "going to bring us together," and Chuck Todd expresses skepticism. Then Yamiche Alcindor, the White House correspondent for the PBS NewsHour, talks about the new bipartisan committee that will be looking at border security, and they are going to "actually talk about facts and, maybe, try to get on the same page."

It's at that point that Chuck Todd — with the skeptical remark, "The problem is in Wyoming and in South Dakota, they think they need a wall, and in Texas and in Arizona, they don't" — throws it to Tom Brokaw, and Tom Brokaw says the things that will get him in trouble:

Nate Silver creates anxiety and allays it.

Seems fair to say that Democrats' polling is underwhelming in states and districts with large numbers of Hispanic voters. At the same time, polling has sometimes lowballed Democrats' numbers in these areas.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) September 19, 2018

"Martin was black and Zimmerman identifies himself as Hispanic."

That's a telling way to put it, in a CBS/AP article about the judge's ruling that the jury can consider the lesser included charge of manslaughter. Reader "Jane" emails to say:

This must be in the AP stylebook somewhere, because that sentence, or some variation therof, is found in every single article about the case:  Martin "is" black but Zimmerman only "identifies" as Hispanic.  Can you recall any other situation in which AP has played with racial identification vs. race as a fact in the news story?

This is a great topic about which to maintain vigilance.

I'm going to put that alongside a related topic that I've been noticing of late: The Disappearing Hispanic. Remember that NYT article we were talking about the other day — "Zimmerman Case Has Race as a Backdrop, but You Won’t Hear It in Court"? I didn't bring this up at the time, but I noticed  The Disappearing Hispanic phenomenon in this sentence:

"If all ethnic identities are created, imagined or negotiated to some degree, American Hispanics provide an especially stark example."

"As part of an effort in the 1970s to better measure who was using what kind of social services, the federal government established the word 'Hispanic' to denote anyone with ancestry traced to Spain or Latin America, and mandated the collection of data on this group."

“The term is a U.S. invention,” explains Mark Hugo Lopez, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center....

“There is no coherence to the term,” says Marta Tienda, a sociologist and director of Latino studies at Princeton University. For instance, even though it’s officially supposed to connote ethnicity and nationality rather than race — after all, Hispanics can be black, white or any other race — the term “has become a racialized category in the United States,” Tienda says. “Latinos have become a race by default, just by usage of the category.”...

If most Hispanics are united in something, though, it’s a belief that they don’t share a common culture. The Pew Hispanic Center finds that nearly seven in 10 Hispanics say they comprise “many different cultures” rather than a single one. “But when journalists, researchers or the federal government talk about” Latinos, Lopez acknowledges, “they talk about a single group.”

If it's an invented, created category, the questions become: Who is using this category and for what purpose? What are the alternative categories, and who has something to gain/lose from using those categories? What is the political dynamic that feeds the dominance of this political categorization and suppresses the alternatives, and what changes would cause those alternative categories to become prominent?

"Sorry, gays. Obama prefers Latinos to you."

"But thanks for all the contributions!"

Obama "must repair his badly damaged relationship with the business community, which overwhelmingly supported Mitt Romney."

"It’s doable. From avoiding the so-called fiscal cliff, to an overhaul of immigration laws, to tax reform, there’s much more common ground than the combatants could acknowledge during the campaign."

It's doable. But what do you want done?

Meanwhile, Mickey Kaus says: "The entire GOP elite seems to be trying to sell out en masse on immigration.

Maybe these people are convinced the larger GOP project can be saved simply by caving on just this one issue. That seems cracked.  The bulk of the Hispanic electorate appears to instinctively vote Democratic, and not just because of immigration. Maybe they can be wooed over to the Republican side over the course of decades. But by then there will be another wave of new, instinctively Democratic illegal immigrants (lured by the Boehner Amnesty) for Dems to appeal to. And the idea that the GOPs don’t have to change any of their other ideas if only they appease this one ethnic group (making up 10% of the electorate) is highly questionable....

"Young, pragmatic, Hispanic, just what GOP needs..."

It needs: George Bush!

George P. Bush.