Patrick Buchanan is outraged at the lack of diversity shown by Democratic Presidents in Supreme Court nominations.  Outraged! Buchanan’s outrageous outrage comes not from the fact that Barack Obama and Bill Clinton — the only two Democrats to appoint Supreme Court justices in over 40 years — regularly chose judicial activists and liberal ideologues to sit on the Court.  (Heck, so did George H. W. Bush with David Souter and Gerald Ford with John Paul Stevens, for that matter.)  No, Buchanan is angry that the Supreme Court has no Protestants, which apparently insults half of the US (via Yid with Lid):

Not since Thurgood Marshall, 43 years ago, has a Democratic president chosen an African-American. The lone sitting black justice is Clarence Thomas, nominated by George H. W. Bush. And Thomas was made to run a gauntlet by Senate liberals.

Indeed, of the last seven justices nominated by Democrats JFK, LBJ, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, one was black, Marshall; one was Puerto Rican, Sonia Sotomayor. The other five were Jews: Arthur Goldberg, Abe Fortas, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.

If Kagan is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats.

Is this the Democrats’ idea of diversity?

But while leaders in the black community may be upset, the folks who look more like the real targets of liberal bias are white Protestants and Catholics, who still constitute well over half of the U.S. population.

Er, why would Catholics be upset?  Six of the current justices are Catholic.  Except for Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor, they’re also white.  We have both liberal and conservative Catholics on the bench, for that matter.

Which reminds me of a joke: Six Catholics and three Jews walk into a courtroom, and they turn into Pat Buchanan’s worst nightmare…

The problem for Buchanan isn’t the lack of Protestants as much as it is that Kagan will become the third Jewish jurist on the court.  Religion has very little to do with adjudicating law, unless we’re planning on turning the US into a theocracy.  Only in that case would the faith affiliation of the court’s members have any relevance.

What does matter is their judicial philosophy.  Unfortunately, Democrats have a long history of appointing people with “diversity” in mind to the Court instead of fidelity to the Constitution and a proper respect for the checks and balances of the federal system.  Instead of ruling on the law, too many appointees of both parties have become lawgivers instead of jurists in the name of their personal, “diverse” sense of justice.

A true conservative wouldn’t turn into a bean counter on non-issues like skin color, ethnicity, or religion when it comes to Supreme Court appointments.  We want the best candidates we can find for the nation’s highest court, not assigned seating based on demographics.  Screeching about religious diversity on a secular court is every bit as detestable as the kind of diversity scolding in which liberals like to engage.