Cuellar, 43, is an associate justice on California’s State Supreme Court. He was born in Mexico. He is a naturalized U.S. citizen. He grew up on the border, and his family moved to California’s Imperial Valley when he was a teenager. He was smart and decided he wanted an education. He got one, all right. Get this resume: undergrad, Harvard; law school, Yale; master’s and doctoral degrees, Stanford.

Here’s his full Stanford bio, so you can give it a gander, but it’s incredibly impressive. He worked at the White House, he worked in the Treasury Department, he taught law at Stanford. “He’s a brilliant guy,” says Samuel Bagenstos, a law professor at the University of Michigan who knows Cuellar. “He’d be the justice with the most wide-ranging intellect since William O. Douglas.” (Bagenstos asked me to note that he is backing no single candidate and thinks the president has many good choices.)…

This is Reince Priebus’s perfect nightmare, is it not? Let America watch as old white-guy senator after old white-guy senator goes on TV to say “Oh, it’s nothing against Mr. Cuellar, it’s all about Obama, and the people’s voice.” And let America watch as nominee Donald Trump says the same thing. Or even Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz—in some ways that’s even worse for the GOP, to have a Cuban-American (or Cuban-Canadian-American) stand up and say this Mexican-American doesn’t belong on the Supreme Court. There are around 33 million Mexican-Americans in the country—and around 2 million Cuban Americans. How well do you think the math on that works for the GOP?

So Priebus, who in his silly little autopsy in 2013 insisted that Republicans were going to be the inclusive party and who still has the gall to talk like that today, even as his party’s voters convert a howling xenophobe into their front-runner, would have quite a situation on his hands. And we get to Election Day, and poor Cuellar has been sitting there for seven months after nomination without even having had the courtesy of a committee hearing.